Are you heading to TechEd Australia 2010? You could win a new XBox 360

Posted on 19 August 2010 by anthonyborton

If you’re heading to TechEd Australia 2010 next week on the Gold Coast, make sure you call past the Enhance ALM stand and drop your business card in for a chance to win an XBox 360 s with 250Gb HDD, Wireless controller, Wireless Headset and ChatPad.

Entries (business cards) must be put in the barrel on WEDNESDAY 25th August at our stand in the Expo Hall. Look for Stand 63 in the back left corner of the expo hall near the Blue theatre. We’ll have the XBox with us so you’ll get to take it home and start playing straight after TechEd too Smile

Win-Xbox-banner

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Canberra–“Mastering Testing with VS2010” just 3wks away

Posted on 18 August 2010 by anthonyborton

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.

    Posted in Training, VS2010 | Leave a comment

    Professional Scrum Developer training–Sprint 1

    Posted on 20 July 2010 by anthonyborton

    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 Professional Scrum Developer Logoand 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 Story Board takes shape
    The StoryBoard starts to come together.

    My Lenovo S10 makes a good Timebox Clock
    My Lenovo S10 netbook makes a great timebox clock.

    Anthony in disguise as the Product Owner
    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

    Posted in Training | Tagged , | Leave a comment

    How to avoid a possible TFS 2005/8 to TFS 2010 upgrade issue

    Posted on 26 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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”.

    Posted in VS2010 | Tagged | Leave a comment

    New TFS2010 – Configuration and Administration course released

    Posted on 18 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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

    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

    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.

    Posted in Training, VS2010 | Leave a comment

    Lab Management error: TF259115

    Posted on 17 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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:

    image

    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:<collectionName> /Edit /Name:<HostGroupName> /LabEnvironmentPlacementPolicy:Aggressive

    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.

    image(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

    Posted in Lab Management, VS2010 | Leave a comment

    IT Core Blog to the rescue

    Posted on 14 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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”

    SNAGHTML2f6a4d5

    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 :)

    Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

    New TFS 2010 exam released: 70-512

    Posted on 13 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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.

    Posted in Training, VS2010 | 1 Comment

    Upcoming User Group presentations in New Zealand – VS2010 Testing

    Posted on 10 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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:

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

        Altova ProALM

    Posted in User Groups, VS2010 | Leave a comment

    Problem connecting to TFS 2010 server using Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010

    Posted on 4 June 2010 by anthonyborton

    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
    2. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
    3. Team Explorer 2008
    4. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010

    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
    2. Re-Apply Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (to patch the Team Explorer component)
    3. Re-install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010
    Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment