Posts

In the VSLive! keynote Microsoft made announcements about Lab Management, it will be RTM’d later this month and best of all it will be included as part of the benefits of the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN SKUs. You can read more detail on Brian Keller’s blog I think this is a great move on licensing, we had expect it to be purchasable addition to Visual Studio. With this change it now is consistent with TFS i.e. if you have the right SKU of Visual Studio and MSDN you get the feature. This greatly removes the barrier to entry for this technology. ...

[Also see Running MSDeploy to a remote box from inside a TFS 2010 Build (Part 2)] A fellow MVP Ewald Hofman wrote a great post on getting an Web Application to deploy as part of a TFS 2010 build. I have been using this technique but found a few points that were not right in the original post, I assume these are down to RC/RTM issues and the fact I was trying to access a remote system. ...

Now I know this should be simple and obvious but I had a few problems today publishing a web service to a new IIS7 host. These are the steps I had to follow to get around all my errors: Take a patched Windows Server 2008 R2, this had the File Server and IIS roles installed. I install MSDeploy (http://blog.iis.net/msdeploy) onto the server to manage my deployment, this is a tool I am becoming a big fan of lately. ...

If you have VS2010 Premium or Ultimate [Professional corrected error in orginal post] you have code coverage built into the test system. When you look at your test results there is a button to see the code coverage You would think that there is easy way to use the code coverage in your automated build process using Team Build 2010, well it can done but you have to do a bit of work. ...

It is Agile Yorkshire time again, it is a real shame that due to the move of the meeting from the 2nd Wednesday to the 2nd Tuesday I really struggle to make the events. Particularly irritating this month as this one look really interesting and the speaker, Ralph Williams, from past evidence always is entertaining. To quote the Agile Yorkshire site the session will.. “The presentation will focus on the techniques that testers use to identify their tests, whether working from a requirements specification or on agile teams. ...

One of our clients has been working on a nice scale out implementation of TFS2010 (migrating from an existing TFS2005). They are using AT load balancing, failover SQL cluster and Search Server Express to unify search. As you might expect this has been a interesting learning experience for all. You can find out about some of the problems they have had and their solutions are http://www.rancidswan.com/?cat=19

I have been meaning to watch back the video taken of my recent presentation for a while. This weekend I have had the chance to sample the highlights! In the past I have always found it hard to watch myself on recordings, though after the initial cringe this time it was not too bad. I must be getting used to the critical process. So what have I learnt I say ‘err’ to ‘err’ much ‘err’ I move my hands about much like Magnus Pike, a childhood 1970/80s TV popular science reference as seen in this Thomas Dolby video and this Mitchell and Web sketch, for those not old enough to remember. I don’t think it is too irritating do you? But to carry it off fully I do need madder hair. I tend to wander about the stage, I know it is consider good presenting practice not to talk and walk at the same time. But does this actually get on the audiences nerves? It certainly does me when watching when I jump up and down during a demo. I think I know why I am doing it, I heard about an idea from NLP for presenting/teaching to always deliver specific types of information from the same physical location e.g. funny anecdote by the windows, summary points by the lectern etc. The idea is it subconsciously primes the audience what to expect and how to treat it e.g. oh here he is by the lectern I must remember this as it is important. I guess I need to just be a bit more sparing in the application of this technique. I still use too many slides, I especially need to focus on less bullet pointed ones. When presenting at the BCS recently the projector broke 5 minutes into my session and I did the rest of the session without slides (that the audience could see). All I missed was a couple of images of Scrum and Kanban (and wild hand waving an pointing at a white wall got me round the problems). I the feedback I got was good. However a key factor was I could see my bullet pointed slides on my laptop. I realised the slides are my speaker notes. So next time I intend to try very few audience slides but have a stack much like my normal one running on PowerPoint on my phone. Lets see how that works. …..Oh and I have a Birmingham accent, someone could have mentioned it! I would heartily recommend anyone presenting to have a look at videos of your sessions, even if they are just ones taken with a camcorder or phone from the back of the room. You may be surprised how you appear, sessions often look very different to the audience as opposed to how you felt it went from the stage. ...

The Software Craftsmanship 2010 conference has been announced and is open for registration. The last Software Craftsmanship conference was one of the most useful events I have ever attended, so this years should be well worth attending, even though it has gone from being a free event to having a small charge. As a bonus it is at Bletchley Park, in itself worth a trip. Get in quick spaces are very limited.

I came back form holiday to find a Netgear GS108 switch with all it leds flashing and it passing no data. This is exactly the same symptoms as this post. My fix did not involve the use of a soldering iron as detailed in the post, I just swapped the PSU and it started working fine. I have seen this before, the PSU shows it’s age before the device itself. Good job I have a big box of misc PSU from devices down the years ...

SPDisposeCheck is a great tool for SharePoint developers to make sure that they are disposing of resources correctly. The problem is it is a bit slow to run, a problem as this will mean developers will tend not to run it as often as they should. A good solution to the problem is to run it as part of the continuous integration process. There is are posts on how to do this via unit tests and as a MSBuild task, but I wanted to use a TFS 2010 style build. Turns out this is reasonably straight forward without the need to write a custom activity. ...