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.

So you’ve just upgraded your TFS 2010 server to TFS 2012. And you’ve been using the MSF Agile 5.0 process template. When you open the Web Access webpage, you get a message saying that some features need to be enabled, and you click the link and it “upgrades” your process template so that the Backlogs and Boards work in Web Access. All looks good.

You’re a responsible developer – you write code, and then you write tests (or, perhaps you even write tests and then write code?). You also love good, solid frameworks that separate concerns and utilize dependency injection and inversion of control and all of that good stuff – you’re using MVC for your web applications.

In my post about hosted build, I discovered that if you enable code coverage on unit tests that use the Fakes framework, the unit tests fail (even though the tests pass without code coverage turned on). The error is a “ShimNotSupportedException”.

I am a huge fan of Lab Management. Being able to manage test rigs centrally (and, if you’re using Hyper-V, self-provisioning and self-servicing) is a huge productivity bonus.