Why is my TFS report not failing when I really think it should ?

Whilst creating some custom reports for a client we hit a problem that though the reports worked on my development system and their old TFS server it failed on their new one. The error being that the Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_CompletedWork was an invalid column name Initially I suspected the problem was a warehouse reprocessing issue, but other reports worked so it could not have been that. It must really be the column is missing, and that sort of makes sense....

August 15, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Where have my freeview tuners gone?

I have been a long time happy user of Windows Media Center since it’s XP days. My current systems is Windows 8.1 an ATOM based Acer Revo with a pair of USB PCTV Nanostick T2 Freeview HD tuners. For media storage I used a USB attached StarTech RAID disk sub system. This has been working well for a good couple of years, sitting in a cupboard under that stairs. However, I am about to move house and all the kit is going to have to go under the TV....

August 14, 2014 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Getting the Typemock TFS build activities to work on a TFS build agent running in interactive mode

Windows 8 store applications need to be built on a TFS build agent running in interactive mode if you wish to run any tests. So whilst rebuilding all our build systems I decided to try to have all the agents running interactive. As we tend to run one agent per VM this was not going to be a major issue I thought. However, whilst testing we found that any of our builds that use the Typemock build activities failed when the build agent was running interactive, but work perfectly when it was running as a service....

August 2, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

AddBizTalkHiddenReferences error in TFS build when installing ProjectBuildComponent via a command line setup

I have been trying to script the installation of all the tools and SDKs we need on our TFS Build Agent VMs. This included BizTalk. A quick check on MSDN showed the setup command line parameter I need to install the build components was /ADDLOCAL ProjectBuildComponent So I ran this via my VMs setup PowerShell script, all appeared OK, but when I tried a build I got the error C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftBizTalkBizTalkCommon....

August 2, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TFS 2013 wizard allows you to proceed to verification even if you have no SQL admin access

Had an interesting issue during and upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013.2 today. The upgrade of the files proceeded as expect and the wizard ran. It picked up the correct Data Tier, found the tfs_configuration Db and I was able to fill in the service account details. However, when I got to the reporting section it found the report server URLs, but when it tried to find the tfs_warehouse DB it seemed to lock up, though the test of the SQL instance on the same page worked OK....

August 1, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell