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Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written than the future they predict. I have just read ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers which in many ways is a similar book for our social media, big brother monitored age....

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each has a pair of mirrored disks for the OS and RAID5 group of disks for data....

If you use TFS then it is well worth a look at Brian Harry’s Teched2014 session ‘Modern Application Lifecycle Management’. It goes through changes and new features with TFS both on-premise and in the cloud, including Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub Authentication with your corporate Active Directory account via AAD (planned for Summer 2014) New API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks Release Management, PowerShell DSC, ability to link Azure VMs including client OS for dev/test Application Insights available inside Visual Studio Azure vNext portal – bring it all together Not all these features are in 2013....

A very common question I am asked at clients is “Is it possible for a parent TFS work item to be automatically be set to ‘done’ when all the child work items are ‘done’?”. The answer is not out the box, there is no work item state roll up in TFS. However it is possible via the API. I have modified my TFS Alerts DSL CodePlex project to expose this functionality....

Whilst running tests as part of a Release Management deployment I started seeing the error ‘The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required’, and hence all my tests failed. It seems that there are issues that can cause this problem, as mentioned in the comments in Martin Hinshelwood’s post on running tests in deployment, specially spaces in the build name can cause this problem, but this was not the case for me....