A hair in the gate

My Arc mouse started behaving strangely today, very jumpy. Felt like the cursor was being pulled left. Turns out the problem was a tiny hair caught in the led sensor slot You could see there was a problem as the led was flashing a lot, when it is normally solidly on if turn over the mouse you look into the slot. Once I got it out all was fine again

December 12, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Notes from my session of the Visual Studio 2013 launch at NDC London

Thanks to anyone who came to my session ‘TFS is not just for Visual Studio users’ at the Visual Studio 2013 at NDC London yesterday. Hope you found it useful and are now thinking of TFS as a tool for heterogeneous teams, not just developers using Visual Studio. As I discussed there are many options: Developers can work within their IDEs Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 Any IDE based on Eclipse...

December 4, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

The TFS 2013 Brian Keller demo VM is available

The TFS 2013 Brian Keller demo VM is available at http://aka.ms/vs13almvm

November 28, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for 0xc00d36b4 error when play MP4 videos on a Surface 2

Whilst in the USA last week I bought a Surface 2 tablet. Upon boot it ran around 20 updates, as you expect, but unfortunately one of these seemed to remove its ability to play MP4 videos, giving a 0xc00d36b4 error whenever you try. A bit of a pain as one of the main reasons I wanted a tablet was for watching training videos and PluralSight on the move. After a fiddling and hunting on the web I found I was not alone, so I added my voice to the thread, and eventually an answer appeared....

November 27, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Microsoft Patterns & Practice publication ‘Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012’

Are you interested in building your own release pipeline using only the tools within TFS 2012 (or 2013)? If so why not have a look at the Microsoft Patterns & Practice publication Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012 it provides great background and a full work through via its hands-on-lab.

November 22, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My guest post on the UK MSDN blog on ‘Using MSDN Azure benefits with TFS Lab Management’

A guest post I wrote has just been published on the UK MSDN blog titled ‘How VPNs can help you use your MSDN Azure benefits with TFS Lab Management’

November 20, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Announcing a CodePlex project that provides an IronPython DSL that can be used to define the handling of TFS Alerts

I have just published a new project to CodePlex http://tfsalertsdsl.codeplex.com/. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) provides an alerting model where given a certain condition, such as a check-in, work item edit or build completion, an email can be sent to an interest party or a call made to a SOAP based web service. Using this SOAP model it is possible to provide any bespoke operations you wish that are triggered by a change on the TFS server....

November 17, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Fixing a WCF authentication schemes configured on the host ('IntegratedWindowsAuthentication') do not allow those configured on the binding 'BasicHttpBinding' ('Anonymous') error

Whilst testing a WCF web service I got the error The authentication schemes configured on the host (‘IntegratedWindowsAuthentication’) do not allow those configured on the binding ‘BasicHttpBinding’ (‘Anonymous’). Please ensure that the SecurityMode is set to Transport or TransportCredentialOnly. Additionally, this may be resolved by changing the authentication schemes for this application through the IIS management tool, through the ServiceHost.Authentication.AuthenticationSchemes property, in the application configuration file at the element, by updating the ClientCredentialType property on the binding, or by adjusting the AuthenticationScheme property on the HttpTransportBindingElement....

November 13, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

When your TFS Lab test agents can’t start check the DNS

Lab Management has a lot of moving parts, especially if you are using SCVMM based environments. All the parts have to communicate if the system is work. One of the most common problem I have seen are due to DNS issues. A slowly propagating DNS can cause chaos as the test controller will not be able to resolve the name of the dynamically registered lab VMs. The best fix is to sort out your DNS issues, but that is not always possible (some things just take the time they take, especially on large WANs)....

November 8, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Building VMs for use in TFS Lab Management environments

We have recently gone through an exercise to provide a consistent set of prebuilt configured VMs for use in our TFS Lab Management environments. This is not an insignificant piece of work as this post by Rik Hepworth discusses detailing all the IT pro work he had to do to create them. This is all before we even think about the work required to create deployment TFS builds and the like....

November 7, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell