Enhance ALM will be delivering their popular 2-day “Mastering Testing with Visual Studio 2010” course in Canberra on the 8th & 9th September. This course is designed for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the exciting new testing features in Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Test Professional 2010.

• Module 1: Introduction to Agile Testing
  • Module 2: A lap around Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
    • Module 3: Working with Microsoft Test Manager
      • Module 4: Manual Test recording and playback
        • Module 5: Test Automation and Coded UI Testing
          • Module 6: Web Performance and Load Testing
            • Module 7: Reporting test progress and the status of tests
              • Module 8: An overview of Lab Management Download Course Outline | Visit course website | Register for this course

              This course is also scheduled for Sydney and Melbourne in September 2010.

This week I am delivering the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) training course in Adelaide. The course has been jointly developed by Scrum.org, Microsoft and Accentient and is focused on teaching .NET development teams how to successfully adopt Scrum. The course combines aspects of Scrum, Visual Studio 2010 and Software Engineering Practices and involves both theory and practical exercises. At the end of the course students will sit an online exam and should become Certified Professional Scrum Developers.

Here’s a few photos from Sprint 1.

The StoryBoard starts to come together.

My Lenovo S10 netbook makes a great timebox clock.

Here I am in my disguise as the Product Owner.

If you’d like to find a Professional Scrum Developer course near you, visit the Scrum.org website at http://courses.scrum.org/

If you’re interested in having this course taught in-house for your staff in the Asia-Pacific region, feel free to email me at anthonyb@enhancealm.com.au

Brian Harry has blogged about a potential issue that can occur when you upgrade an existing TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010. The issue is only likely to effect a very small number of upgrades and applying a quick patch before you upgrade will remove the risk altogether.

For all the details read Brian Harry’s blog post entitled “TFS 2010 Upgrade Issue”.

One of the things I frequently find myself doing is delivering training to clients as part of TFS consulting engagements. During the TFS/VS Beta 2 period, I had four courses I regularly ran for clients. Based on my experience running these courses on the Beta release, I have significantly updated two of the four courses so far and expect to have the remaining two released by the end of June.

I wanted to talk about the TFS2010 – Configuration and Administration course in this post. This course has gone from one day to two days in duration to fit in the relevant content. I have targeted this course at what I will call the “TFS Guru” or go-to person that every team has in an organisation. If you’re the person that people go to to get things done of TFS, then this might be a course for you.

Course Highlights

• Learn how to install and configure TFS 2010
  • Manage Team project collections including backup and restore
    • Learn how to correctly create and secure Team Projects
      • Configure source control for optimum flexibility
        • Customise and manage Process Templates
          • Create new ad-hoc reports using Excel

            • Create build environments using controllers and agents</ul> Course Outline

            • Module 1: Introducing Team Foundation Server 2010

              • Module 2: Managing TFS instances
                • Module 3: Creating and Managing Team Projects
                  • Module 4: Managing Security and Permissions
                    • Module 5: Source Control Configuration
                      • Module 6: Managing Process Templates
                        • Module 7: Reporting
                          • Module 8: Team Build
                            • Module 9: Useful third party tools</ul> If you want to find out more about the course, you can download the full outline from the Enhance ALM website. Download Outline.

                            Great for Certification

                            As an added bonus, this course makes a great study aid for the recently released “TS: Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Administration” exam from Microsoft.

                            How do I attend the course?

                            I usually run this course on-demand for clients. If you would like to find out more about attending this course or getting it run in-house for your company, send me through an email at sales@enhancealm.com.au.  I am also running this as a public course in Brisbane on the 8th & 9th July if you’re in that area.

While preparing a demonstration of Lab Management today I experienced an error I hadn’t seen before. The error message occurred when I created a new Virtual Environment and attempted to deploy to an existing host group using Lab Center.

The error message looked like this:

and the text was as follows:

TF259115: Team Foundation Server could not find any suitable host to deploy the virtual machine: Win2K8R2x64IIS.

More details: All the hosts in the host group had one or more of the following inadequacies:

Memory requirement of the virtual machine(s) exceeds the available host resources. The placement policy for this host group is set to be conservative and hence virtual machines that are in stopped state are also accounted as consuming host resources.

In this case I had a demo server with 8Gb RAM with only one running virtual machine using just 1.5Gb of the available RAM. The new environment I was trying to deploy had a single server in it with just 1.2Gb allocated. As the error indicated, I needed to change the “placement policy” for the host group from conservative to um? non-conservative? I looked in every nook and cranny I could find in SCVMM but couldn’t find anything about changing the placement policy.

After putting out a call for help, Deepraj Dixit, a developer in the Lab Management team came to my rescue with the following information.

“The lab environment placement policy is an attribute of host group in lab management object model. At present, there is no UI way to change this setting. You can use the TFSCONFIG command as below:

TfsConfig Lab /hostgroup /CollectionName: /Edit /Name: /LabEnvironmentPlacementPolicy:Aggressive</font>

I logged onto my TFS Server, started a command prompt and went to work. You can see in the following screen shot that I made the change and then confirmed it using the “/list” option to make sure the change had taken effect.

(Click image to enlarge)

You can find out more about the TFSConfig Lab /HostGroup command line options at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547199(VS.100).aspx

I was configuring a Lab Management setup today and after a reboot of the Hyper-V host, I found I could no longer RDP to the host machine. The error message was a rather cryptic “An authentication error has occurred. The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted. Remote computer: hvlabhost”

After digging around checking the appropriate domain controller, manually configuring the time service and a variety of other potentially useful but largely irrelevant settings, I found the following helpful blog entry.

“Hyper-V Error: An authentication error has occurred. The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted.”

I had a bit more of a look through the rest of the blog and likely what I found.

IT Core Blog – Subscribed 🙂

Microsoft have just released a new exam targeted at IT Professionals that install and administer Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010. The exam is one of the Technical Specialist exams and is only the second TFS focused exam released.

The full title of the exam is:

70-512: TS: Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Administration

Once you successfully complete the exam, you will complete the requirements for the following certification:

MCTS: Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, Administration

You can find out all about the exam on the Microsoft Learning website.

If you’re in Australia, a great way to prepare for the exam is to attend Enhance ALM’s newly updated two-day “TFS2010 – Configuration and Administration” course.

Later this month I will have the pleasure of presenting at three user groups in New Zealand. For those of you not familiar with the user group community in New Zealand, it is one of the most well organised and cohesive developer communities I am aware of.

These are the dates and locations where I will be presenting for those of you in NZ and interested in attending.

• Monday 21st June – VSTS Users Group, Wellington
• Tuesday 22nd June – North Shore .NET Users Group, Auckland
• Tuesday 29th June – Christchurch .NET Users Group, Christchurch

The session I will be presenting at each of these user groups is as follows.

Coded UI Tests in Action

For developers, it is easy to focus testing efforts on unit tests and leave the rest to dedicated testers. Learn how this has changed with the new Coded UI Tests in Visual Studio 2010. Using Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate, developers can create automated User Interface tests in code to test the UI for an application functions correctly. You can add assertions in the test to ensure UI controls have certain properties and behave as expected. You can even run the tests as part of your automated builds. In this session you will learn how developers can write effective and maintainable Coded UI tests and increase the quality of their application.

Some great giveaways never hurt either

At each of the three user group presentations, I’ll also have a number of giveaways for attendees as well. We all know that people just love to win things 🙂

At each of the three user group presentations, I will be giving away the following:

• 1 x Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET license (Valued at USD$1,690)
• 1 x winners choice of one of the following from Altova. XMLSpy (XML editor) or  MapForce (data mapping, conversion, & integration tool), or StyleVision (stylesheet designer)
• 1 x “Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010” book from Wrox

A huge thanks to the fine folk at Infragistics, Altova and Wrox Press.

   

I came across a problem today whereby a user had installed the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 and was then unable to connect to their TFS 2010 server.

The error they were getting was “TF30335: The server name cannot contain the characters ‘/’ or ‘:’, or start with ‘http://’ or ‘https://’. If the server name is an IPV6 address, it can contain the character ‘:’ only if the full name is enclosed by square brackets.”

The most likely cause of this is the order in which the software has been installed. In my case the client had installed software in the following order.

1. Visual Studio 2008
   • Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
     • Team Explorer 2008
       • Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010</ol> This means that the actual Team Explorer component has NOT been upgraded with SP1.

       To fix the problem, all we did was this.

       1. Uninstall the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010
          • Re-Apply Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (to patch the Team Explorer component)
            • Re-install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010</ol>

The VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 RTM release in now available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt. 

The following are the new capabilities available in this release:

• New GUI interface which provides a simpler and improved experience. The UI supports the following options
• Self Service Mode:  This mode should be used by owners/users of Lab environments to quickly install/upgrade agents on VMs that are part of their Lab environment. They will need to login to the VM as an administrator and run this tool on the VM to start off the installation process.

• Admin Mode: This mode should be used by and Lab Administrators who are in charge of creating/upgrading templates with pre-installed agents. This mode requires the tool to be run from a machine with SCVMM Administrator console installed and requires the user to be an SCVMM delegated administrator.

• Simplified UI based experience for creating VM templates, without the need to author XML configuration files.
• Support for upgrading Visual Studio Agents on virtual machines. The tool has been enhanced to provide support for upgrading from Beta2 or RC version to RTM version of agents.
• The Tool now enables Remote desktop connection on the VMs as part of the configuration process.
• The Tool now provides an option to disable machine account passwords from expiring. This enables domain joined Lab environments to continue functioning when they are reverted to an old snapshot.