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Really pleased to say I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM. It great to be involved with such as activity community as the ALM crowd, can’t wait for the next summit in November.

The next DDDNorth event is to be held at Sunderland University on the 12th October. Session submission has now opened so why not get your session proposal in?

The way most big conferences manage to virtually live stream everything is very impressive. I started watching the stream of yesterdays Microsoft Build keynote on the office’s big projection screen with everyone else at Black Marble. I have always said the best way to enjoy a keynote is on the comfy sofa with a beer at the end of the day. So much better than an early queue then a usually over air conditioned hall with 10,000 close friends....

After last nights release of new TFS and Visual Studio bits at the Build conference I spent this morning upgrading my demo VMs. Firstly I upgraded to TFS 2012.3 and then snapshotting before going onto 2013 Preview. So by changing snapshot I can now demo either version. In both cases the upgrade process was as expected, basically a rerun of the configuration wizard with all the fields bar the password prefilled....

Just wasted a bit of time trying to find the build tab on a TFS Team Project hosted on the hosted http://tfs.visualstudio.com using a Git repository. I was looking on team explorer expecting to see something like But all I was seeing the the Visual Studio Git Changes option (just the top bit on the left panel above). It took to me ages to realise that the issue was I had cloned the Git repository to my local PC using the Visual Studio Tools for Git....

Background if you use Twitter in any web you will probably have noticed that they have switched off the 1.0 API, you have to use the 1.1 version which is stricter over OAUTH. This meant the Twitter feeds into our blog server stopped working on the 10th of June. The old call of http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=blackmarble did not work and just change 1 to 1.1 did not work. So I decided to pull down a different widget for BlogEngine....

An interesting change with Lab Management 2012 and SCVMM 2012 is that templates become a lot less useful. In the SCVMM 2008 versions you had a choice when you stored VMs in the SCVMM library. … You could store a fully configured VM or a generalised template. When you added the template to a new environment you could enter details such as the machine name, domain to join and product key etc....

I posted recently about my experiences in upgrading DotNetNuke 5 to 7, what fun that was! Well I have now had to do the move for real. I expected to follow the same process, but had problems. Turns out the key was to go 5 > 6 > 7. Once I did this the upgrade worked, turns out this is the recommended route. Why my previous trial worked I don’t know?...

Martin Hinshelwood did a recent post on moving source code between TFS servers using git tf. He mentioned that you could use the --deep option to get the whole changeset check-in history. Being fairly new to using Git, in anything other than the simplest scenarios, it took me a while to get the commands right. This is what I used in the end (using the Brian Keller VM for sample data) …...

With Visual Studio 2012 have you missed the automated unit test generation tools that were present in Visual Studio 2010? If you have then the ALM Rangers have produced the ‘Unit Test Generate VS Extension’. The first beta of this is now available on the VSGallery. Why not download it and try out so you can provide feedback to the team?