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Background We have been successfully using our TFS Lab Management system for a while. However, we have noticed an issue that when deploying environments the performance of the system slowed. This was down to I/O congestion between our servers and the SAN that provided their main VM storage because the library store and the hyper-v host servers all shared the same SAN. Also we had the need to start to create environments using Windows 8 and Server 2012....

Yesterday two new ALM Ranger projects shipped, practical guidance on the use of Microsoft Fakes (which I worked on) and for Team Foundation Server (TFS) Disaster Recovery avoidance, planning and step-step recovery walkthroughs for the worst case scenarios. Also updates for the Coded UI test tooling guide and the TFS Upgrade guide were released.. For more details see below to follow the links to the Ranger blogs and CodePlex to download the materials....

About a year ago I wrote a post ‘Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint?’. Well this discussion becomes relevant for more people as with Visual Studio 2012.2 (currently available as a CTP) the Microsoft Fakes move from the Ultimate SKU to the Premium SKU. From my experience the Ultimate SKU is not present on too many developer’s PCs. It is most commonly found on the PCs of the team leads, software architects or test developers (managing coded UI/load testing etc....

Whilst at the MVP Summit in Redmond last week there were MVP2MVP sessions, these are much like DDD conferences we have in the UK, sessions delivered by MVPs on their experiences and products they offer. One of the most interesting I saw last week was VS Anywhere. This is an extension to Visual Studio that allows distributed pair programming. This far more than desktop sharing in Skype or Lync, think more like the concurrent document editing in Office 365....

TFS Lab Management can be a good way to manage your development and test environments, providing a means to more easily store, deploy and snapshot environments. Problem is they are not magic, you need to create the virtual machines you will use. You can use tools such the ALM Rangers VM Factory to speed this process, but you still need the source ISOs to create the VMs. Until the release of System Center 2012 SP1 (and TFS 2012 QU1) Lab Management did not support Windows 8 or Server 2012....