Girish's Blog - Are you Live yet?

  I often teach and do demos of VS and TFS and I always like to do it from the Client machine, instead of doing it from a Server OS. The reason is the UI looks very neat and polished when done from a Client OS like Windows 8 or Windows 7. The following...

  Both Office 2013 Clients and as well as the Office 365 products now have a cool feature called “Apps for Office”. It is best to see what this is via an example. For example lets take the case of an e-mail. Depending on the content of the mail,...

Issue One of my friends had an issue with installing the Remote extensions for SharePoint which comes with the TFS 2012 media on a SharePoint 2013 (note only 2013 is supported on Windows 2012) that he had on a Windows Server 2012 machine. The SP 2013...

  This gets asked quite often, hence the post  – how do I make my build to run on a particular machine only?. How to turn OFF work item creation on Build failure (as we have a high number of failures due to unstable builds) and while we are...

  Today Brian Harry announced in his blog that TFS will support Git based repositories. To those that don’t know what Git is, it is a popular Version Control system within the Open Source Software (OSS) community, that is based on a distributed model...

Issue/Problem: I have a large number of build definitions, which are increasing by the day, as we are adding branches and along with that several builds per branch. Is there some way to “group” build definitions, and maintain some sanity, instead of pulling...

  This question has come up quite a few times and this is my take on this. During installation and configuration of TFS you give the TFSSetup and TFSService account certain DBO privileges on the SQL databases. Typically these are the two major accounts...

Sometimes when you try to launch the TFS backup tool from the TFS Admin Console, you might notice that nothing happens. It just refuses to launch or silently dies. You basically have no clue why it fails to launch. You might get a stack trace of an exception...

  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...