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If you want to know the health of the TFS server there are a number of options from a full System Center MOM pack downwards. A good starting point are the performance reports and administrative report pack produced by Grant Holiday. Though the performance pack is designed for TFS 2008 they work on 2010 and 2012, but you do need to do a bit of editing. As the installation notes state, create a new shared data source called “TfsActivityReportDS” Set the connection string to: Data Source=[your SQL server];Initial Catalog=Tfs_[your TPC name] - this is the big change as it this used to point to the tfs_ActivityLogging DB, this (as of TFS 2010) is now all rolled into you Team project Collection DB, so you need to alter the connection string to match your TPC....

If you are using the TFS 2012 Java API it is important you read the release notes. It is not enough to just reference the com.microsoft.tfs.sdk-11.0.0.jar file in your classpath as you might expect. You also have to pass a Java system property that associates com.microsoft.tfs.jni.native.base-directory with the location of the native library files that provide platform specific implementation for method calls. The command line for this is done in the form...

With TFS 2012.2 Microsoft have added tags to work items. These provide a great way to add custom information to work items without the need to customise the process template to add custom fields. This is important for users of the hosted http://tfs.visualstudio.com as this does not, at this time, allow any process customisation. It is easy to add tags to any work item via the TFS web client, just press the Add....

The problem I have been working on a project that contains SharePoint 2010 WSP packages and a MSI distributed WPF application. These projects are all in a single solution with their unit tests. I have been getting a problem with our TFS 2012.2 build system, all the projects compile but at the test point I get the unhelpful TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Unable to load one or more of the requested types....

Today Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Global Windows Azure Bootcamp event. To see what is happening check out the photos on our Facebook gallery and the #GlobalWindowsAzure Twitter hashtag