When roving what I hate most about windows mobile 6 is not knowing what connection it will try to use.

When travelling aboard what I hate most about Windows Mobile 6 is that I have no idea if the phone is going to trying to use a local WiFi or 3G. Mobile Outlook seems the worst culprit, it loves 3G over everything else!. On mobile 6.5 there are just too many places where you might need set which data connection to use. This means, for fear if a nightmare phone bill, I tend not use us my phone for data. And just just don’t realise how much you use it at home until you are away. ...

June 17, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

All set for Olso – Off to NDC 2010

I have sorted all the bits for my presentations so am ready for my trip to NDC 2010 in Olso tomorrow. Really looking forward to it, the agenda looks great.

June 15, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Video of my Microsoft Techdays session on Lab Management

I had not checked the site for a while, but my Microsoft Techdays session on Lab Management is now available as a video I cannt make it embed here, some Community Server issue I assume, so look for it on the developer track on the second day. It is called ‘Putting some testing in your TFS build process"

June 11, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

How little do you have to do to run a VS/TFS2008 build on a TFS2010 server?

As do many people I have a good number of TFS2008 style builds for legacy applications. I will, in the end, move these over to VS2010 and hence upgrade their build formats to the new 2010 workflow based one, but for now it would be nice to be able to run them with the minimum of effort. To this end I have done some work to see the minimum I can get away with to allow these builds to run, the aim being to leave the build box as close to a virgin TFS2010 one as possible. ...

June 10, 2010 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

TF31002: Altering the URL that your TFS 2010 Web Client uses to talk to the AT

The Web Client for TFS 2010 (what was called Team System Web Access TSWA) is now installed as a core part of the Application Tier. It is no longer a separate install as it was in previous versions. This means it is easy to implement, it is just there by default. However, this can raise some problems if intend to expose to TFS AT via a firewall to the Internet, or use an alias for your TFS AT. This is because, by default, the Web Client uses it’s host server name as the AT name to connect to, it assumes the AT is local. ...

June 9, 2010 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Thoughts on the BCS EGM

I got the paperwork for the British Computer Society EGM this week. This EGA raises some interesting issues, the best overview of the issue I have found seems to be on the Computer Weekly site. So has supporters of the EGM motion argument, led by former BCS trustee Len Keighley, any merit? Yes, it does. Enough to vote out the current BCS management and trustees? Well I am not so sure. I was a student member of the BCS in the late 80s, when I was working for a small PC and LAN dealership. It was not good experience, I left the BCS with a feeling they did not care for anything bar old mainframe style IT and had no interest in anything newer than the late 70’s. ...

June 6, 2010 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Hanging Humax PVT9200T PVR

Recently my Humax PVT9200T has started to hang. When I started it up, within a minute or two (usually much less) the picture froze. Prior to this it had been working fine for the six months I had owned it. This seems to be a common problem for the PVT9200T of late, there is much talk of a patch on the way. For me the immediate solution seems to have been simpler; I just reset it to factory defaults and let it rescan the channels. It has now been working fine for a couple of days. Maybe this simple solution will help other owners of the PVT9200T ...

June 5, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Can you mock out .NET extension methods with Typemock? – the answer is yes

In Kevin Jones’ session at today’s DDD South West on ‘Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications’ the question was asked it it was possible to mock out .NET extension methods using any mocking frameworks. Kevin said did not think it could be done with Rhino Mocks, but thought it might be possible with Typemock. Given my experience with Typemock I could see no reason why you would not be able to fake an extension method with Typemock, though I had never had need to do it. A quick search when I got home provided this post by Dennis van der Stelt which explains how to do it. t is just as easy as you would expect. ...

June 5, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Today’s DDD South West

Thanks to everyone who turned up for my session at DDD South West, and to the organisers for putting the event on so well. As my session was basically a 1 hour demo of the testing tools in VS2010 there are no slides for me to upload, but if you have any questions ping me an email. I would say that for a good overview of the subject have a look at the book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ ...

June 5, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TF50609 error when creating a new team project in TFS 2010

After upgrading a TFS 2010 RC server (which was previously upgraded from Beta1 to Beta2) to RTM I hit a problem when trying to create a new team project. The error I saw was Event Description: TF30162: Task “GroupCreation1” from Group “Groups” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: TF50609: Unable to retrieve information for action ADMINISTER_TEST_ENVIRONMENTS, it does not exist. A quick search shows this is a known problem with TFS 2010 Beta 1 to Beta 2 upgrades, strange it did not show itself on our servers until we when to RTM. Grant Holiday provides the solution for Beta 1 to Beta 2, but the command line required for RTM is slightly different to the one he had to use. The fix involves using both the parts of this post, the TF50660 is a symptom of the underling TF237091 error ...

June 4, 2010 · 2 min · Richard Fennell