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Utility to Manually Refresh the TFS2010 Warehouse
Every once in a while, you may find that you need to manually refresh your Team Foundation Server 2010’s data warehouse. You’ll know you need to do that manual refresh when your TFS2010 reports start tossing off errors like “The Team System cube either does not exist or has not been processed” or “An error…
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TechEd Atlanta 2011: Identify & Fix Performance Problems with Visual Studio Ultimate
I was lucky enough to get to speak at TechEd Atlanta this year and I did a session on fixing performance problems using the tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Identify & Fix Performance Problems with Visual Studio Ultimate It’s a common problem: you’re getting close to when you’re supposed to deploy your new ASP.NET…
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Scrum Dysfunction: Beware of the Rewrite Project
I recently wrote a short article for Redmond Developer News talking about the difficulty that teams commonly have using Scrum when tasked to re-write an existing application and it just got published. At first glance, you’d think that a Rewrite Project would be easy but I see team after team get crushed by this kind…
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System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Refresh-VMHost, WMI Providers, and the Wifi Card
I got a new laptop a few months ago and, since day 1, I’ve been trying to get System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) installed on it so that I could run Team Foundation Server 2010 Lab Management. Getting SCVMM installed was fine but when I went to associate my Hyper-V host (aka. The…
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Silverlight 4 Coded UI Tests + IE9: “No Silverlight controls were detected.”
I was playing around with the new (well, new-ish) Silverlight 4 Coded UI Tests that came with Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 this weekend. I trying to create a Coded UI test using the recorder and kept getting the following error: No Silverlight controls were detected. Verify that the application under test is built…
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Top 4 Reasons Why a Shared Development Database is Evil.
It’s pretty common. A development team will frequently have one instance of SQL Server — filled with data from production — that all the devs use to develop and test the next version of the application. It’s one of those things in software development that feels like “common sense”. Of *course* you’re going to have…
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TFS2010 Build: How to access Platform/Configuration variables in a build script
The Problem: You have a Team Foundation Server 2010 Team Build that compiles a solution (.sln) with more than one Platform and Configuration. When your build is compiling the Platform/Configuration combinations, you need to know which combination is currently being processed so that you can perform custom build logic in the workflow activities. The Solution:…
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TFS2010 Build Agent Cannot Talk to Controller: “There was no endpoint listening at http://servername:9191/Build/v3.0/Services/Controller/5 that could accept the message”
The Problem: I ran into a problem with a customer’s Team Foundation Server 2010 build server today. The server’s been up and running for at least 6 months and then suddenly it wouldn’t run builds anymore – the builds would start and then hang with the message “Run On Agent (waiting for build agent)”. When…
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Microsoft ALM Summit, November 16–18, 2010
I’ve been in Redmond, WA for Microsoft PDC 2010 this week and I keep getting reminded or asked if I’m going to the Microsoft ALM Summit. It’s happening in Redmond from November 16 to 18 and unfortunately, I’ve got a conflict and I won’t be able to make it to this conference. Anyway, there are…
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Article: Load Testing with Visual Studio 2010 (+ how to set up your Load Testing Rig)
I wrote a two part article for Visual Studio Magazine on Web Testing & Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010. Here’s the second part. This second part focuses on how to do Load Tests with a Load Testing Rig with an emphasis on how to actually install and configure your rig. (Here’s the link to…