Stupid support suggestions from Vodafone about 403 server proxy errors

A while ago I blogged about the problems I was having with 403 error when trying to use my HTC phone as a 3G modem or using Opera or IE on the phone itself. When I initially complained Vodafone refunded my data fee for the month and said engineers were onto this known intermittent issue. No grief, Ok I did not want to see 403 errors but I was happy with the customer service, fast and no quibble. ...

May 13, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TF237195 error when creating a new team project

After upgrade TFS 2010 RC to RTM you might see a problem when you try to create a new team project. The creation fails with error: Module: Engine Event Description: TF30162: Task “Queries” from Group “WorkItemTracking” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: TF237195: The following user name is not supported: [SERVER]$$PROJECTCOLLECTIONADMINGROUP$$ The answer is simple, but I had missed it! Make sure that you are creating your new team project from a copy of the 2010 RTM version of Team Explorer. If you use the RC version you will see the error. ...

May 13, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My article on Typemock Insider Blog

I have an article posted on the Typemock Insider blog about the Typemock Academy I attended.

May 11, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TFS 2010 RC –> RTM upgrade problem with the warehouse

I recently did an in-place upgrade of a TFS 2010 RC to RTM box. All appeared to be going fine, all the verification in the upgrade wizard passed, but when I hit configure the first step failed. It said there was a missing dbo.sysobjects in the warehouse DB. I then had to resort the configuration DB as it was partly upgraded to try again as the DB was left partially upgraded. ...

May 10, 2010 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

TF246064 upgrading TFS 2010RC to RTM

I have a basic installation of TFS 2010 running on my Windows 7 laptop. This is really useful for testing build customisation and the like, a great new feature for 2010. Today I got around to trying to upgrade it from RC to RTM, but on the verification test I got the error [ Configuration Database ] TF255407: An error occurred while attempting to validate the configuration database. Error message: TF246064: No database could be found for the following host: TestCollection. The host has the following ID: eaf3c572-8657-4268-9852-3d73a799cdf5. To fix this problem, use the TFSConfig RemapDBs command-line tool and make sure that you specify the SQL Server instance that contains this database. ...

May 4, 2010 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Slides from my Typemock Academy session

A PDF version of my slides for my session at the Typemock Academy on SharePoint testing with Typemock are available on the Black Marble site.

April 27, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Busy week, off to see Typemock in Oslo

I am off to Oslo, for the first time, for the Typemock Academy this week. The event has managed to survive the disruption of the Icelandic volcano. A great chance to meet a pile of people I have only spoken toon the phone or via email in the past. Looking forward to it.

April 25, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Mocking Sharepoint for Testing

In my previous post I talked about using Isolator to mock Sharepoint to aid the speed of the development process. I find this a productive way of working, but it does not really help in the realm of automated testing. You need a way to programmatically explore a webpart, preferably outside of SharePoint to check its correctness. You could use the methods in my previous post and some form of automated web test, but this does mean you need to spin up a web server of some descriptions (IIS, Cassini etc. and deploy to it) An alternative is look at the Typmock addin Ivonna. This a creates a fake web server to load you page and tools to explore it. ...

April 22, 2010 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator

I have found the most productive use of Typemock Isolator with SharePoint is to use it to reduce the time of the F5 cycle (build/deploy/use). If you are using a VPC of some type to do your SharePoint development, as many do, this process can easily take a couple minutes, and these minutes add up. In my experience webparts usually make fairly simple use of the underlying SharePoint site, by this I mean that they get some data from an SPList(s) or remote data source and render in some way. Or the reverse, they gather data that they drop to an SPLits(s) or remote data source. ...

April 22, 2010 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Post SharePoint Evolution thoughts

I am on the way home from my whistle stop visit to the SharePoint Evolution conference. I must say congratulations to the organisers for putting on such a successful event given all the problems they have had related to speakers and air travel, well done. My slides, on Testing Webparts with Typemock, will appear on the conference site soon, but I thought it a good idea to link here to previous posts I have done on the subject. Imaging how surprised I was to realise to find I never wrote them! If you search my blog you will find links to older versions of today’s slide stack, but no coding samples. ...

April 21, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell