Todays ISV event at Microsoft UK

Thanks to everyone who came today’s ISV session at TVP. You can find all the slides from the event at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukisvdev/archive/2011/06/27/slides-and-links-from-alm-and-visual-studio-2010-event-on-the-27th-june-2010.aspx

June 27, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Microsoft UK Techdays video’s available

The videos from the various Microsoft UK Techdays events can now be viewed at the UK TechDays site. This includes my session on ‘Virtualisation of the Test Environment’ and the joint one I did with James Mann on the new experience for developing SharePoint solutions in VS2010 from the Leeds event.

June 23, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking at Microsoft UK next week

I will be speaking at Microsoft UK’s ‘Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors’ event next Monday. I am one of four speakers, between us well all address a variety of subjects within ALM Modern Software Delivery: The continuous delivery of high quality software - Colin Bird Driving Quality Throughout the Application Lifecycle - Richard Erwin Extending Testing into the Lab - Richard Fennell The Secrets of Repeatable Success - Adam Gilmore I believe there are still spaces available ...

June 22, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More from the ALM Rangers - Lab Management Guide

The Build Customisation project was not the only ALM Rangers release over the weekend. The Lab Management Guide was also shipped. This provides scenario based and hands-on guidance for the planning, setup, configuration and usage of Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by custom VM Template automation for reference environments. If you work with Lab Management, or would like, this is well worth a read

June 20, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1

For those of you have have not spotted it the TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 is now available. This is a roll up of all the fixes that have be released since TFS 2010 SP1. This form of cumulative release is going to be the way forward for TFS, so it will be easier to know what to install on a server without reading loads of QFE documents. For more details read the full details on Brian Harry’s blog ...

June 20, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

ALM Ranger’s Build Customization Guidance has shipped

I am really please to say that the first ALM Rangers project I have been involved with, the Build Customization Guidance, has shipped. The project had the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, code signing, and branching. You can find details at the Rangers blog,the project table of content or the codeplex site I have certainly learnt a good deal working on this projects, thanks to everyone who made it such a interesting experience. Hope anyone reading the materials find them as useful. ...

June 19, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My first serious problem with my WP7 device

My WP7 LG-E900 decided to do a factory reset last night. It locked while playing the XBox Live GEODefense game on a particular busy level I had just lost (so lots of graphic processing). The phone paused for a while then restarted and ran the first use wizard, in German. This is because it is one of the PDC units that seem, given the packaging, to have been sourced from Vodafone German. ...

June 16, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Using VSTO to access TFS

Have you ever thought ‘I know that you get the Team ribbon in Excel to manage TFS work items, and I can use Excel to as a SQL/OLAP client to run reports from the TFS warehouse but I want to do more….’? Have you every considered using VSTO to create an ActionPane that uses the TFS .NET API? In this example I have created an ActionPane that allows you to select a Team Project Collection, a Team Project and then a build definition. Press the button and it lists the builds that have run of this type using the TFS .NET API. ...

June 3, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Cannot connect to a Lab Management Environment using the MTM Environment Viewer

Today we had a problem that we could not connect to VMs within a Lab Management environment from the Environment Viewer in MTM. We had composed the environment from VMs independently create and tested on the HyperV host. The plan in the end is to have this as a network isolated environment, but for now it is a private domain that exists on our main LAN. The first issue we had was that as this was a private domain the various hosts were not registered on our DNS, so we got a DNS lookup error for the VM host names. This is best fixed with network isolation, but for a quick fix we put some entries in a local hosts file on the PC we were using to resolve the name to IP addresses. ...

June 1, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

How to fix extra Quickstart help menu items when installing Typemock Isolator

I recently noticed that I had a few too many ‘Typemock Isolator Quickstart’ help menu items in Visual Studio 2010 After a quick check with Typemock it seems this was a known issue with previous versions of Isolator, you should not see it on a new installation (6.0.10). If you do have the problem do as I was advised, run the VS macro, created by Travis Illig, to remove the extra items. ...

May 30, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell