At a customer we installed Release Management for their TFS 2013 TFS Server. The server component installation went really smoothly – however, it was only when we installed the Client that we realized that the Release Management service was not right – we kept getting a 503 Service Unavailable error. I opened IIS and could see that the Release Management application pool was stopped. I started the app pool, but it immediately shut down. We checked the event log and saw a few obscure error messages about NullReferenceExceptions – nothing particularly helpful.

I have been doing some coded UI testing and running tests using Chrome (via the Selenium components). However, I noticed that when my test completed successfully, the Selenium (ChromeDriver) window stayed open and never terminated. Here’s a code snippet of my original code:

Yesterday I posted about how to create script hooks in a 2012 build template. My colleague Tyler Doerksen commented and pointed out that there was no error handling in my solution.

EDIT: My colleague Tyler Doerksen pointed out in his comments that my solution doesn’t do any error checking of the scripts. If your script fails, the build happily continues. I’ve added another post to show how to add error handling.

I’ve just completed recording a Release Management webcast (more on Imaginet’s Visual Studio webcasts here). While doing the webcast, I wanted to show how you can use tokens which Release Management can substitute during the Release Workflow. Brian Keller suggests a .token file (basically an exact copy of your web.config file except that you use tokens instead of values) in his Release Management hands on lab, but I hate having to keep 2 copies of the same file around.

If you’ve upgraded to TFS 2013, then you’ll notice that there’s a new Default Build template. In fact, to support Git repositories, the product team moved the default template into a super-secret-database-backed-folder-you-can’t-get-hold-of-place in TFS. This means that you won’t see it in the BuildProcessTemplates folder.

If you have Visual Studio Ultimate and are not using IntelliTrace in production, you should be drawn and quartered. This is arguably the best feature of Visual Studio Ultimate, and in my opinion this feature alone justifies the pricing (never mind Web Performance and Load testing, Code Maps, Code Lens, UML diagrams and Layer diagrams).

I upgraded my demo environment from 2013 Preview to 2013 RC. Everything looked good until I got to the builds. I had configured a couple of default builds – the 2013 default template is actually stored in the TFS database (not in source control like the old Default xaml files) unless you actually download it for customizing.

Some of the code I’ve written before has made it into the TFS Build Extensions latest release. They are my “Include Merges (and associated work items) in a build” and “Fail code based on Code Coverage” activities.

I have installed TFS 2013 RC. I upgraded my TFS Express (that I use for mucking around with code) from TFS 2012.3 and everything went smoothly. I then opened up Web Access and was pleased to see one of the best features yet for TFS work items: lightweight charts.