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. I wanted to test out a Standard Environment (what used to be called Physical Environment in TFS 2010). I am using Brian Keller’s RC VM and another VM (WebTest) for my test machine, both of which are workgrouped (and not ...

Last week I was helping a customer get up and running with Lab Management. In an effort to make sure they’re up to date, I installed TFS and VS 2010 SP1 on their TFS machine as well as in all the Lab machines. Everything was going smoothly until we started running automated tests. The tests would return as “not executed” and the error was: "Attempted to access an unloaded AppDomain. (Exception ...

I was at a customer recently who have a small test database – around 120MB in size. I had encouraged them to use the DB Professional tools in VS 2010 to track their schema – that way they could deploy the database (as well as the latest schema) and some test data (through INSERT statements or even better, data generation plans). However, their developers didn’t have the time or skills (yet) to do ...

So you’ve got your virtual environment running and you’re deploying your application using the Lab Default Workflow. Only, you have a config file and you need to update a connection string or something in the config file for automated tests to run properly. Now if you’re deploying websites, for goodness sake use WebDeploy  and the Web.Config transforms within Visual Studio to configure your ...