Should my TFS Build Server be 32bit or 64bit?

I would say at this time unless you need 64Bit specific assemblies built you are best staying on a 32bit operating system. This will happily build MSIL .NET assemblies which I guess for most of us is the bulk of our work. OK you loose a bit of performance if you have 64bit hardware (or virtual hardware in our case), but I doubt this will be critical, shaving a few seconds of an automated build is not normally important....

December 22, 2008 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Getting MSB6006 errors for MSTest under TFS Team Build 2008

I have been rebuilding our TFS build systems on Hyper-V based virtualised hardware. The long term plan being to hold a configured build server as as Hyper-V template to we could prevision extra ones quickly, or rebuild all of them if we need to upgrade some library or tool; in effect to give us revision control over our build servers. All seemed to be going OK, initially existing builds seemed to be running OK when targeted at the new server....

December 22, 2008 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

TFS TeamBuild and Sharepoint WSP deployment (and any post build events for that matter)

We use the SharePoint Visual Studio Project Template on CodePlex to create WSP deployment packages for our SharePoint features. I tend to think of this WSP creation project in the same way as a MSI installer; so we don’t put SharePoint components into the WSP solution itself, it is an extra project in the solution that assembles the components from a variety of other solutions (e.g. web parts, workflows, event receivers, shared libraries for the GAC etc) and builds a single deployable WSP file....

December 19, 2008 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

Steve Ballmer’s MVP Live Search Challenge

At the last MVP Summit Steve Ballmer said “I’m going to ask you one week switch your default [search engine], one week. At the end of the week…I’ll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn’t you like … Can I make that deal with you? (Cheers and applause.) That’s the deal.” Well the week was last week, and how did I find Live Search?...

December 9, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Developer testing of Sharepoint Webparts using Typemock Isolator and Ivonna

Updated 3 Dec 2008 – I got an email from Artem Smirnov the author of Ivonna pointing out a couple of things, so I have updated this post Updated 3 May 2009 – I altered the code samples as the previous ones did not seem to work with Typemock Isolator 5.3.0 . I have previously written a post on using Isolator with Sharepoint, also Andrew Woodward has written a good and more detailed tutorial on the subject, so I don’t intend to go over old ground here....

December 4, 2008 · 8 min · Richard Fennell