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Time for the usual reminder for the next Agile Yorkshire meeting. This month it is by Mark Stringer on ‘Techniques for dealing with difficult conversations & negotiations in software development’. Usual time, usual place, usual free beer. ….and just a heads up for the December meeting, as this is at a different venue, Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/), it is going to be by David Joyce of the BBC on ‘Kanban for Software Engineering’ ...

I have recently upgraded my dual tier TFS 2010 Beta1 instance to Beta2. This is not an officially supported migration but it is certainly possible. The basic process of the update is straight forward: Remove Beta1 from the AT Install Beta2 Run the configuration wizard in upgrade mode (this took a few hours for DB upgrades) Once this was complete I had what I thought was a working Beta2 server (I saw no errors), but there were problems. ...

We recently moved our central SQL server to new SAN hardware and at the same time upgraded from SQL2005 to SQL2008. Once this was done we noticed that our TFS Reports were running against old Warehouse data. Checking the TFS Application Tier event log we saw: TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension: Date (UTC): 21/10/2009 10:27:25 Machine: TFSAT Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/287244640/Root/Warehouse-2-129005451884971104 Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Warehouse, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727 Process Details: Process Name: w3wp Process Id: 2716 Thread Id: 2848 Account name: MYDOMAINTFSSERVICE ...

I recently posted on my experiences of Access 2010, well if you want to know more have a look at the video by Clint Covington and Ryan McMinn on Channel 9

About 2 hours ago Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released to MSDN subscribers, the usual wait for the download now start! Also the revised SKU and licensing model for 2010 was made public by Brian Harry. This is meant to be simplification, but still remains fairly complex with the usually questions over ‘is that in this SKU or that?’ The key point for me is that the cost of entry for TFS is going to drop significantly, as the TFS server and a client CAL is included in the MSDN subscriptions with the VS Pro, Premium and Ultimate SKUs. Should break down a few barriers ...

So what I have I been doing of late? The blog has been a bit quiet. Well I have been having a good look at Access Services in SharePoint 2010. This has been an interesting experience, as I am not historically what you might call an avid Access developer. Like most .NET developers I had looked as Access as more of a file format than an application, something from the past. Something that I might use for a small data store, maybe in a web application hosted on a cheaper ISP that does not provide ‘a real’ SQL DB, or where an XML data files don’t seem right, often because I just can’t be bothered to work out the XPATH. When using Access as a data format it seems easier to get at my data using basic hand crafted SQL commands or maybe at most via a OLEDB Data Adaptor/DataSet. All very old old school. Thinking about Access in this way just seems an easy way out, playing it safe with the knowledge I have. I don’t for a second propose that this a good idea, you should not be looking at using any technology just because it is there and you already know it. There are obvious downsides, using Access in this manner meant that from the ADO.NET developer side I could not: ...

I am off to present in Ireland this week in a double header with another of Black Marble’s test team, Robert Hancock. We will be appearing at the Microsoft Ireland Visual Studio Academy. Our subject is Improved efficiency throughout the test cycle. As registration is still open I guess there are still spaces, so if it is of interest to you why not sign up (and who is not interested in testing?) ...

Wednesday this week is the next Agile Yorkshire meeting, there are 2 presentations and a discussion planned: Agile War Stories: A Project Managers Perspective. Ian Carroll User Story Estimation: Alan Williams An open discussion about Lean and Kanban in software development. As usual the meeting is at The Victoria Hotel, Leeds from 6:30 onwards for a 7:00 start. See www.agileyorkshire.org for more details. On Tuesday next week there is the West Yorkshire BCS meeting on ‘The World of Ubuntu and Open Source’ by Matthew Barker of Canonical Ltd. As usual the venue is the The Met, King Street, Leeds, LS1 2HQ ...

This week I tried to add a new project collection to our TFS 2010 Beta1 test system. All seemed to be going OK, the settings verified without issue but I got the error TF252005 when it tried to create the associated SharePoint site (on the WSS 3.0 instance on the TFS application tier). Now unlike TFS 2008 this was not a blocking problem. On 2008 if any team project step failed, such as the team WSS site creation, then the team project was rolled back. It is a really nice feature of 2010 that if there is an error it does try to do as much as it can. So in my case, I ended up with TFS collection with no associated SharePoint site collections, not what I wanted but usable. ...

Over the weekend Brian Harry posted on this blog about a new ‘Basic’ edition of TFS. This is aimed squarely small team currently using Visual SourceSafe. It will provide version control with work item tracking and can be run on SQLExpress. The key difference for the ‘Standard ‘ edition is that it will not have SharePoint or Reporting Services integration. For far fuller details check the blog post. I think this is going to be a really interesting addition to TFS. This announcement answers a question I was repeated asked at our [TFS2010 event last week](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Managing the Application Lifecycle&Code=), ‘we are a small team with VSS, I want something simple to move us forward, what should I use? TFS seems a bit complex and expensive’ So for me it is well timed and well placed within the marketplace. ...