Reinstalling again…

Just completing the second reinstall of Windows 8 on my Lenovo W520 in 10 days due to my new SSD failing and needing to be replaced. To try to ease the process I though I would try putting on the miscellaneous tools I use such as 7Zip, Filezilla etc. using Chocolatey. I have to say first impressions are good, one command and the product is on, the files pulled from the appropriate site....

November 2, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Team Foundation Service RTMs

Today at Build 2012 it was announced that https://tfspreview.com has RTM’d as Team Foundation Service on https://tfs.visualstudio.com. Up until now there has been no pricing information, which had been a barrier to some people I have spoken to as they did not want to started using something without knowing the future cost. So to the really good news, as of now It is free for up to 5 users If you have an active MSDN subscription it is also free....

October 31, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

403 and 413 errors when publishing to a local Nuget Server

We have an internal Nuget Server we use to manage our software packages. As part of our upgrade to TFS2012 this needed to be moved to a new server VM and I took the chance to upgrade it from 1.7 to 2.1. The problem Now we had had a problem that we could publish to the server via a file copy to its underlying Packages folder (a UNC share) but could never publish using the Nuget command e....

October 31, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Nice introduction to the new features of VS2012

If you are looking for a nice introduction to the new features of Visual Studio 2012, I can heartily recommend Richard Banks ‘Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook’. This book covers a wide range of subjects including the IDE, .NET 4.5 features, Windows 8 development, Web development, C++, debugging, async and TFS 2012. This is all done in a easy to read format that will get you going with the key concepts, providing sample and links to further reading....

October 30, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Problems re-publishing an Access site to SharePoint 2010

After applying SP1 to a SharePoint 2010 farm we found we were unable to run any macros in an Access Services site, it gave a –4002 error. We had seen this error in the past, but the solutions that worked then did not help. As this site was critical, as a workaround, we moved the site to a non-patched SP2010 instance. This was done via a quick site collection backup and restore process....

October 25, 2012 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Moving to an SSD on Lenovo W520

[Also see http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/post/2013/01/22/More-on-HDD2-boot-problems-with-my-Crucial-M4-mSATA.aspx] I have just reinstalled Windows 8 (again) on my Lenovo W520. This time it was because I moved to a Crucial m4 256Gb 2.5” internal SSD as my primary disk. There is a special slot for this type of drive under the keyboard, so I could also keep my 750Gb Hybrid SATA drive to be used for storing virtual machines. I had initially planned to backup/restore my previous installation using IMAGEX as I had all I needed in my PC, but after two days of fiddling I had got nowhere, the problems being...

October 23, 2012 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

New video on unit testing in VS2012 and TFS

A video has just be uploaded that I did on the new unit testing features in Visual Studio and TFS 2012. This is quick 10 minute introduction to some of the material I will be covering at DDDNorth next weekend. Hope you find it useful

October 8, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More fun with creating TFS 2012 SC-VMM environments

Whilst setting up new a new SC-VMM based lab environment I managed to find some new ways to fail above and beyond the ones I have found before. We needed to build a new environment for testing CRM application, this needed to have its own DC, IIS server and a CRM server. The aim was to have this as a network isolated environment, but you have to build it first as the various VMs....

October 5, 2012 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Getting a SQL LocalDB to create an ASPNETDB data base without aspnet_regsql

I started working today on a solution I had not worked on for a while. It makes use of an ASP.NET web application as a site to host SharePoint webparts (using Typemock to mock out any troublesome calls). The problem I had was that when I opened this VS2010 solution in VS2012 I could not run up this test web site. As the test web pages have WebpartManager controls it needs an ASPNETDB in the AppData folder to persist the settings data....

October 2, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

TFS Test Agent cannot connect to Test Controller – Part 2

I posted last week on the problems I had had getting the test agents and controller in a TFS2012 Standard environment talking to each other and a workaround. Well after a good few email with various people at Microsoft and other consultants at Black Marble I have a whole range of workarounds solutions. First a reminder of my architecture, and note that this could be part of the problem, it is all running on a single Hyper-V host....

October 1, 2012 · 3 min · Richard Fennell