Update 2013-07-24 : This activity is now part of Community TFS Build Extensions.

On January 11, Brian Harry blogged about some bugs in the TFS 2012 upgrade process (as well as the link to the KB patch for fixing the bugs). I was upgrading a customer in December last year and we hit one of the “symptoms” that was fixed with the patch.

TFS’s Work Item Tracking system is amazing – the flexibility and customizability of the system is fantastic. It also allows your tool to enforce your processes – which is always a good thing for efficiency in any team!

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been doing a lot of VS / TFS 2012 demos, as well as installing / configuring / customizing TFS at customers. Everyone loves the Code Review Workflow, but inevitably the question gets asked, “Can I enforce code review on check-in”? Out of the box you can’t, but I created a custom policy for this.

In an earlier post I talked about my Hybrid Lab Workflow – this workflow allows you to do a Build-Deploy-Test workflow against a TFS 2012 Standard Environment, and as long as the environment is composed of VMs and you’re able to connect to the VM Host, then you can apply pre-deployment snapshots and take post-deployment snapshots. I also blogged about the “nastiness” of PsKill and PsExec for getting the Lab into a workable state after snapshots were applied. In this post I’ll talk about how you could use exactly the same workflow for another Virtual Host – say VMWare or something else.

In my previous post I talked about my Hybrid Lab Workflow – this workflow allows you to do a Build-Deploy-Test workflow against a TFS 2012 Standard Environment, and as long as the environment is composed of VMs and you’re able to connect to the VM Host, then you can apply pre-deployment snapshots and take post-deployment snapshots.

Arguably one of the best features of TFS is Lab Management. I loved Lab Management in TFS 2010, even though it was a real pain to set up. There were a lot of moving parts and setup was tricky, but once you got SCVMM configured the rest was magic.

I am pleased to announce that my MVP status was renewed! A large portion of that is due to this blog and all the hits I’ve gotten – so if you keep reading, I’ll keep posting!

I will be co-presenting with Ahmed Salijee at TechDays in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town (12, 16 and 19 Oct respectively). Check out the website for details on exact dates and venues – there is tons of new stuff to show off, so this is going to be a really exciting event!

I’ve installed Windows 8 on my laptop, enabled HyperV and upgraded my TFS from 2010 to 2012. Since Lab Management 2012 introduced Standard Environments, I can use my HyperV machines in lab environments right out of Windows 8. However, while I was configuring my lab, I ran into a problem. My laptop is on my work domain, and my lab machines (running on HyperV) are not joined to the domain – they’re in a workgroup.