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VS2010 has excellent new features to assist the tester in general, and specifically in the area of manual testing. One of these is the ability to video a manual test run; to get this to work you have to have the Windows Media Encoder 9 installed as well as the VS2010 Test Runner . If you don’t have it installed and try to use the video feature you get a dialog that warns you this component is missing and would you like to either download it or disable video recording feature for this test run. ...

Ben Hall has written an interesting post on creating a testing framework with MEF. As Ben said it is more a learning exercise for MEF than a useful product but it certainly show show the ease you can add meta data and reflection like functionality to your codebase. Wish it had been about when I wrote GUITester

I have posted in the past about the TFS 2005 and 2008 Process Template eScrum from Microsoft; a template we use internally for a number of Agile projects. Well today it has been removed from the Microsoft download sites. It was decided a while ago that it would not be updated to support TFS2010 and has been removed to avoid any confusion over whether it is support or not by Microsoft (FYI it was never officially supported anyway as it did not originate inside the TFS team) ...

On my development PC I had a 2005 instance of SQLExpress that was installed as part of the VS2008 setup. I thought I had upgraded it when I put on the SQL 2008 Management tools and/or VS2010 beta, but it seems I didn’t. I thought I would try the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer, but this also thought I had done the upgrade to 2008, I suspect due to the fact I had the 2008 management tools. ...

Don’t forget this month’s Agile Yorkshire meeting is this Wednesday at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. It is the usual mix of free beer, great conversation and an excellent speaker (note: you can assign your own ranking order as these factors, using a suitable Agile planning model). This month the speaker is Nancy Van Schooenderwoert on ‘Seven Paradoxes of Agile Software Development’. Hope to see you there.

To have a good look at TFS2010 I have migrated some existing VS2008 projects to VS2010. This has meant they are now being built using a new TFS 2010 build server. Now I wanted to make sure everyone still knew what was building and what was not, so I updated the configuration on our build wallboard to get the status from both the older 2008 and the new 2010 server – and it did not work. I fiddled around, upgraded the build wallboard to use the TFS2010 assemblies, all to no avail, the application just exited when I tried to get a reference to the build service. ...

After I upgraded an ASP.NET Web Application VS2008 solution to VS2010 I found a strange problem. When I build either the whole solution or the test project in the solution the test assembly gets copies to Web Applications bin directory. However if I build the solution from the command line with MSBUILD they are not copied (so MSBUILD behaves as VS2008 used to). Turns out it is easy to repeat, the process is as follows: ...

I am really happy to say that I have had my MVP for Team System Re-awarded, it is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.

All the ports on the Netgear GS608 I think are meant to be auto speed and uplink sensing, I have found this not to be true. I had the 1Gb uplink to our central switches in Port 8 and a 100Mb Ethernet workstation in port 2 could not get an IP address via DHCP. When I moved the uplink to Port 1 it all leapt into life. Interestingly other 1Gb PCs in other ports had no problem with the uplink in either port 1 or 8. ...

If you apply the TFS2008 SP1 to a system that has been upgraded from TFS 2005, but the WSS was not upgraded from 2.0 to 3.0 you can get a problem that you cannot access the SharePoint portal sites due to WebPart load errors (you get an Event ID: 1000 error in the Windows event logs). This is because the TFS 2008 SP1 installs .NET framework 3.5 SP1 which causes some problems for WSS 2.0. Note this is not usually a problem for new installs of TFS 2008 as these use WSS 3.0 by default, but the upgrade of TFS from 2005 to 2008 does not force the upgrade of WSS 2.0 to 3.0 so sites that upgraded are susceptible. ...