A big source of user feedback when Visual Studio 11 beta was released was the emphasis on “give more space for your content and the second being to draw more focus to that content” – essentially it meant you were seeing a lot of grey in your Visual...

Though Windows Server 8 is still beta, it is garnering a lot of attention from the virtualization industry and customers as well. This is due to sheer number of breath taking capabilities packed into it and as well as the abundant savings customers make...

TFS 2010 and the associated Testing infrastructure for Testing (aka Test Lab capabilities) are designed to work well together, because there are designed closely integrated with each other. In the design of the Test Agent process (QtAgent32.exe which...

One of the things that’s often overlooked is the availability of a strong set of PowerShell commandlets provided as part of the TFS 2010 Power Tools install. When you install it you get a robust set of PowerShell commandlets that you could use to do Version...

This question keeps coming up frequently, and so I thought to make a succinct post on how to do this.   First install the TFS 2010 Power Tools by downloading it to your Client box. You can do a bing search to locate the “TFS 2010 Power Tools download...

Its been a while since I posted. Busy with lot of things and as well some internal projects. Recently an internal project made me dig up this detail. Sometimes people experience some kind of disk pressure on the Application Tier due to the cache filling...

  I had this nagging problem on one instance where the Excel dashboards on a TFS 2010 instance would not bring up the data. Here is how I fixed it (hopefully) someone else will benefit. There could be more than one reason for this error to manifest...

One word - Hyper-V and all its awesome capabilities that are getting UNLEASHED with Windows Server 8. This is perhaps the first release of a Cloud enabled OS of any sort or type by any vendor. While it is very significant to enterprise IT, here is...

I have often fretted about the lack of 64 bit Virtualization capabilities on Windows Client OSs (aka Win7). Fret no more. This is coming to an end with the next generation of Windows Operating ssytems - called Windows 8. In the Windows 8 blog http://blogs...

These days it has become trendy to talk about Virtualization. Virtualization has its virtues – however,you also need to study and plan carefully the workloads that you want to virtualize. Since database hosting is getting virtualized and databases...

WoHoo! Two new certifications achieved. The logos are downloadable from MCP site, only of one passed the exams. 1. For .NET 3.5 I took earlier in the fiscal year 2. For TFS 2010 Administration and Configuration I took recently. Definitely feels good....

  This attachment cleanup tool can be downloaded from the link below. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3d37ce86-05f1-4165-957c-26aaa5ea1010/   For some of the customers who use the advanced capabilities of TFS 2010, such as collecting...

  This question has come up a few times, so I thought I might as well blog. How to connect to Team Foundation Server from the Test Management console. You are connecting from MTM to TFS and you get the following error. Unable to connect to the server...

  FunAnimalCards is an interactive application developed for toddlers to help them to explore and interactively discover animals and receive positive encouragement and feedback in the process of exploring. This is a free application. Following are...

Sometimes people experience some kind of disk pressure on the Application Tier due to the cache filling up and then go hunting on how to set the cache settings so that they can manage the disk pressure. This is not yet (as of the time of writing this...

You are using TFS 2010 and have a complex branching hierarchy with parent child relationships. You also went ahead and restricted permissions on parent branch and gave the branch related permissions ONLY to the developers working on their branches. Now...

Finally Microsoft has released something that should make all TFS and WP7 aficionados very happy. Microsoft (MS) has made access to the TFS Object Model via the Open Source OData protocol, and to boot MS has also provided a sampler to start playing with...

  In 2010 version of Visual Studio one can author Test Cases and associate to the Test Cases automation if one had implemented them. While most of the Test Planning, Test Authoring etc.,. can be done from within Microsoft Test Manager (aka MTM) 2010...

  Sometimes or really quite often it is necessary to run a Team Foundation Server(TFS) Work Item (WIT) query that will pull all the linked child work items(task or bug or test case) for a category of WIT say like a User Story or Requirement. You...

  This is applicable only when you want to move your SRC code across from a TPC to another for using it under a new Process Template in that collection and you don’t care anymore about the old Work Items and Reports. You would rather make a clean...

A question that comes up occasionally from the Build Engineers or from the Release team is : How can I add a new Build quality filter to existing list in TFS 2010 ? E.g. I want to add a value “BVT Pass”? This is very easy and it has been made quite straight...

  Microsoft has released the final general availability of Windows Internet Explorer 9 in 39 languages across the world.  This is the ninth and final release of IE9 in less than a year – I can’t wait for you to download and experience it. The...

  I am posting some of the things I found useful. Primarily for my own memory, as I forget how I did something later. Youtube on WP7 : Sometimes when you try to open a hyperlink to a youtube video which someone sent to you via e-mail and you try...

  Often when you create WP7 applications, you want to share storyboards across pages and make them like a common resource. Also you want to optimize the loading of such resources so that you don’t do disk I/O just to get the xml fragments which constitute...

Now that the Windows Phone is out with its buttery smooth UI, some of you might find the following TIP-SHEET useful. Most of these you can also find http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/default.aspx   List of “hidden” but “Easy to...