TFS Test Agent cannot connect to Test Controller gives ‘No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:6910’

Updated 1st October – See the Part 2 post which provides more workaround solutions Whilst setting up a TFS 2012 Standard Lab Environment for an upcoming demo I hit a problem. Initially my environment had worked fine, I could deploy to my server VM in the environment without error. However, after a reboot of the TFS server (which has the build and test controllers on it) and the single server VM in the environment, the test agent on the VM could not connect to the test controller on the TFS SERVER....

September 29, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Release of Typemock Isolator Basic edition

Some great news today from Typemock, there is now a free basic edition of Typemock Isolator. The addresses a key historic problem with Isolator, that of its cost when you don’t need the advanced features of Isolator all the time. Now if you need the cool advanced mocking features of Isolator, such as mocking sealed private classes, then the cost is not really a factor, you buy the product or don’t get the features....

September 27, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Experiences upgrading an MVC 1 application to MVC 3

I have recently had to do some work on a MVC 1 application and thought it sensible to bring it up to MVC 3, you don’t want to be left behind if you can avoid it. This was a simple data capture application written in MVC1 in Visual Studio 2008 and never needed to be touched since. A user fills in a form, the controller then takes the form contents and stores it....

September 5, 2012 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

Update on my experiences with Lenovo W520 Drivers and Windows 8

After I installed Windows 8 RTM I still had two devices missing drivers. I have made a little progress Base System Device - was the Ricoh PCIe SDXC/MMC Host controller I used this Win 8 beta driver Unknown driver – seems to be the Lenovo Power Management devices. However the Win 8 Beta driver fails to install. I had to use the Windows 7 driver, installed OK and seems to show the right information in the tool tray, but in Device Manager it still says the unknown driver....

September 3, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Its events time again

if you missed yesterdays DDD10, as I did, then don’t worry. You can come to DDD North in Bradford at the University Management Centre on the 13th of October. There is another great set of speakers, I was lucky enough to get my session on Unit Testing and Fakes in VS2012 accepted. Hope to see you there Also my company Black Marble as announced our free autumn and winter events, check them out on our events page....

September 2, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Type ‘InArgument(mtbwa:BuildSettings)’ of property ‘BuildSettings’ errors in TFS 2012 RTM builds

I posted a while ago that you saw errors when trying to edit TFS 2012RC build process templates in VS 2012RC if the Visual Studio class library project you were using to manage the process template editing was targeting .NET 4.5, it needed to be 4.0. Well with Visual Studio 2012 RTM this is no longer the case, in fact it is the other way around. I have recently upgraded our TFS 2012 RC –> RTM and I today came to edit one of our build process templates (using the standard method to edit a process template with custom activities) and got the following error when I tried to open the XAML process template for editing...

August 30, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Two bits of good news – DDDNorth and Raspberry PI

The registration has opened for DDDNorth 2 (In Bradford) where I will be speaking on Unit testing in VS2012 Also my Raspberry PI has just arrived – after only 6 months of waiting, but I don’t think I can work it into my DDDNorth session

August 28, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Getting Typemock Isolator running within a TFS 2012 build – part 2

I posted previously on getting Typemock 7.x running in a TFS 2012 RC build process . Well it seems the activities I previously published did not work on the TFS 2012 RTM build i.e if you do nothing other than upgrade your TFS server from RC to RTM a previously working build fails, no attempt was made to run any tests and I got the unhelpful error TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Executor process exited....

August 24, 2012 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Experiences upgrading our TFS2012RC to RTM

We have just completed the upgraded of our TFS2012 server from RC to RTM. All went smoothly, just a few comments worth mentioning The install of TFS2012 (after the removal of the RC) required three reboots, 2 for C++ components and one for .NET 4.5. So if seeing reboots don’t worry too much. When running the upgrade wizard we got a verify warning over port 443 already being used (we had manually configured via IIS manager for our server to use 8080 and 443)....

August 20, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Weekend trip to see family – 1 OS upgrade, 1 network printer installed and 3 machines de-virused

I have been away over the weekend seeing family, and as anyone who is in IT (or is a medical doctor I suspect) would expect I had the standard experience – everyone wanted me to show me something they were worried about that turned to be virus related. This trip I did one operating system upgrade, one network printer installation and de-virused three PCs. So nothing out of ordinary. The one thing I would mention was how useful I found the contents of Mark Russinovich’s TechEd Session ‘Malware Hunting with the Sysinterals Tools’....

August 20, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell