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I am currently writing some training material for a client on mocking showing how life is so much easier if software is designed with testing in mind. As part of this material I showing that though we aim for nice design patterns which allow testing we have to deal with legacy systems that were not designed this way. However, there are tools that allow us to write unit tests for poorly designed (with testing in mind) legacy systems, specifically Typemock Isolator. Using Isolator means we can write tests that we can use to make sure the code is not broken whilst refactoring to new structures. ...

Session voting has opened at DDD North, vote for what you would like to see at the conference in October

One of the very useful features of the TFS 2010 Power Tools is that it provides a backup wizard, great for teams using TFS who don’t have much SQL/IT Pro experience. Whist setting this up on a server I hit an interesting gotta with sending alerts. This TFS server in question was configured to enable SMTP alerting (via the TFS Administration Console) and this was working During the backup configuration wizard you have the option to be send email if the backup job fails. The SMTP details are picked up from the TFS servers SMTP alert settings. When I enter a TO: email address and pressed the test button I got an error ...

I create a number of task work items in TFS 2010 using a list in Excel. This all appeared to work OK, and I could run a work item query in Team Explorer and see all my new work items. However then I tried to open the work item query in Project I got a TF80070 error. It loaded the work items up a point in the list then failed and showed error dialog. ...

Any session submissions for DDDNorth have to be in by Friday the 26th. Go on you must have something you want to talk about……..

The latest set of TFS 2010 power tools are out, well worth updating if you are using the March release, and if not using any version a definite install. There are major update across the board, summary details can be found on Brian Harry’s blog. With the main release note and download on Visual Studio Gallery

Since I got my new laptop I have had a problem that the Windows Search services in Windows 7 keeps setting itself to be Disabled whenever I restart the the PC. I usually notice this when I try to do a search in Outlook and I have to press enter in the search box to start a search, it is not matching emails as soon as I start to type. ...

I have just posted new ‘how to use it 101’ documentation for the nUnit activity on the community extensions site.

I have just posted new ‘how to use it 101’ documentation for the TFSVersion activity on the community extensions site.

MTM has the feature that you can use Expression Media Encoder 4 to record the test run as a video. To enable this feature, after you install MTM, you have to install the basic version of Expression Encoder, and a few patches see notes here for a list of files and the process. I recently did this on PC and tried to record a video. As soon as the recording process started the PC virtually stopped. It ran to 50%+ load on a dual core 2.3GHz CPU and the mouse disappeared. As soon as I stopped MTM (via task manager and the keyboard alone) it became responsive again. If I ran MTM without a video recording it was fine. Should be noted that if I ran the Expression Encoder (not via MTM) I got the same problem. ...