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Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written than the future they predict. I have just read ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers which in many ways is a similar book for our social media, big brother monitored age....

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each has a pair of mirrored disks for the OS and RAID5 group of disks for data....

If you use TFS then it is well worth a look at Brian Harry’s Teched2014 session ‘Modern Application Lifecycle Management’. It goes through changes and new features with TFS both on-premise and in the cloud, including Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub Authentication with your corporate Active Directory account via AAD (planned for Summer 2014) New API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks Release Management, PowerShell DSC, ability to link Azure VMs including client OS for dev/test Application Insights available inside Visual Studio Azure vNext portal – bring it all together Not all these features are in 2013....

A very common question I am asked at clients is “Is it possible for a parent TFS work item to be automatically be set to ‘done’ when all the child work items are ‘done’?”. The answer is not out the box, there is no work item state roll up in TFS. However it is possible via the API. I have modified my TFS Alerts DSL CodePlex project to expose this functionality....

Whilst running tests as part of a Release Management deployment I started seeing the error ‘The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required’, and hence all my tests failed. It seems that there are issues that can cause this problem, as mentioned in the comments in Martin Hinshelwood’s post on running tests in deployment, specially spaces in the build name can cause this problem, but this was not the case for me....

If you are using Webdeploy you might wish to alter the connection string the for the LocalSQLServer that is used by the ASP.NET provider for web part personalisation. The default is to use ASPNETDB.mdf in the APP_Data folder, but in a production system you could well want to use a ‘real’ SQL server. If you look in your web config, assuming you are not using the default ‘not set’ setting, will look something like...

Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post ‘WebDeploy and Release Management – The Proper Way’ explains how to pass parameters from Release Management into MSDeploy to update Web.config files. On the system I am working on I also need to do some further web.config translation, basically the WCF section is different on a Lab or Production build as it needs to use Kerberos, whereas local debug builds don’t. In the past I dealt with this, and editing the AppSettings, using MSDeploy web....

I have been using Release Management to update some of our internal deployment processes. This has included changing the way we roll out MSDeploy packages; I am following Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post of the subject. I hit an interesting issue today. One of the configuration variable parameters I was passing into a component was a password field. For my initial tests had just let this be a clear text ‘standard’ string in the Release Management....

I have been running Windows Phone 8.1 Update for a couple of weeks now and have to say I like. I have not suffered the poor battery life others seem to have suffered. Maybe this is an feature of the Nokia 820 no needing as many firmware updates from Nokia (which aren’t available yet) note having such power hungry features as the larger phones. The only issue I have had is that I lost an audio channel when using a headset....

A significant blocker for some of my customers moving to Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012 previously) has been the removal of Visual Studio Setup Projects; my experience has been confirmed by UserVoice. Well Microsoft have addressed this pain point by releasing a Visual Studio Extension to re-add this Visual Studio 2010 functionality to 2013. This can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery. Given this release, the question now becomes should you use it?...