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Upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 on my Lenovo W520

I have just done an in place upgrade on my Lenovo W520 from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Something I had not tried during the beta programme, sticking to running Windows 10 in VMs (mostly on Azure). I have to say the process was pretty smooth. I only hit one issue, and this was the usual NVidia Optimus problems I saw installing Windows 8 and 8.1. This is what happened...

Lessons learnt using simple PowerShell scripts with vNext Release Management

If you are using basic PowerShell scripts as opposed to DSC with Release Management there are a few gotcha’s I have found. You cannot pass parameters Lets look at a sample script that we would like to run via Release Manager param ( $param1 ) write-verbose -verbose "Start" write-verbose -verbose "Got var1 \[$var1\]" write-verbose -verbose "Got param1 \[$param1\]" write-verbose -verbose "End" In Release Manager we have the following vNext workflow...

Changes in VS/TFS licensing you really need to be aware of

With the release of Visual Studio 2015 there are some significant changes to Visual Studio and TFS licensing, you can find the details of Brian Harry’s blog. These changes can make a serious change in what you need to purchase for different roles, so it could well be worth a look.

Stray white space in a ‘path to custom test adaptors’ will cause tests to fail on VSO vNext build

If you are providing a path to a custom test adaptor such as nUnit or Chutzpah for a TFS/VSO vNext build e.g. $(Build.SourcesDirectory)packages, make sure you have no leading whitespace in the data entry form. If you do have a space you will see an error log like this as the adaptor cannot be found as the command line generated is malformed 2015-07-13T16:11:32.8986514Z Executing the powershell script: C:LRMMSServicesMmsTaskAgentProvisionerToolstasksVSTest1.0.16VSTest.ps1 2015-07-13T16:11:33.0727047Z ##\[debug\]Calling Invoke-VSTest for all test assemblies 2015-07-13T16:11:33....

Cannot run Pester unit tests in Visual Studio but they work Ok from the command prompt

I have been using Pester for some PowerShell tests. From the command prompt all is good, but I kept getting the error ‘module cannot be loaded because scripts is disabled on this system’ when I tried to run them via the Visual Studio Test Explorer I found the solution on StackOverflow, I had forgotten that Visual Studio is 32bit, so you need to set the 32bit execution policy. Opening the default PowerShell command prompt and and setting the policy only effect the 64Bit instance....