Experiences applying TFS 2012 QU1 and it subsequent hotfix

Brian Harry posted last week about a hotfix for TFS 2012 QU1 (KB2795609). This should not be needed by most people, but as his post points out does fix issues for a few customers. Well we were one of those customers. When upgrading from 2012 RTM to 2012 QU1 we had attempted what with hindsight was an over ambitious hardware migration too. This involved swapping our data tier from a SQL 2012 instance to a new 2012 availability group and merging team project collections from different server as well as applying the QU1....

January 14, 2013 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking on Windows 8 development

On the 23rd of January I am doing a short presentation on the various options for Windows 8 development in Visual Studio 2012 as part of the Modern Jango ‘Tools for Windows 8 - Tips & Tricks on Visual Studio 2012 to inspire beautiful app development’ event. For more details check out the UK MSDN site

January 10, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Lost in nLog configuration files

I have been trying to track down a performance problem today on an ASP.NET MVC. It all turned out to be down to an incorrect connection string in a nLog.config file for logging to a SQL DB. As soon as I commented out the Db target for nLog my login to the web site was virtually instant as opposed to taking 30 seconds (what i assume is a SQL timeout)...

January 8, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

EPG for Windows Media Center is fixed

It seems that the EPG problem with Media Center has been fixed by Microsoft. The are publishing the EPG data again, so we don’t have to rely on the 7 day guide embedded within the TV signal. It is interesting to see the happy MCE users coming out the wood work on The Register’s comments section. We MCE users might not be too numerous, but the people who use it really seem to like it....

January 4, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More fun with Windows 8 Media Center

Signal Strength Since upgrading my Media Center PC to Windows 8, on the same hardware, I have seen that it seems to perform better that on Windows 7. However some channels seem to be dropping out, the usual digital pixilation or a message saying no signal (but often with some audio). As I had not changed any hardware I though this strange, but I have always seemed to have a borderline signal strength even though I can see my local terrestrial transmitter, it is about 15 miles away in direct line of sight....

January 3, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell