Visual Studio Lab Management team blog

Updated 7/16/2012: Please note this an archived post and the Lab Management VHD has been retired and been removed from the Microsoft Downloads site. ...

UPDATE (27 Oct 2010): All videos are now updated with a narration, and uploaded as part of MSDN ‘How Do I’ video series for online viewing. The table below is updated with the new links. Based on popular demand, here are the videos of the different scenarios...

We are happy to announce that the General Distribution Release for lab management in Visual Studio 2010 is now available. A couple of weeks back, we announced the general availability of lab management, licensing changes, and what’s changed since RC....

We get a lot of questions around the support matrix for Lab Management in TFS 2010 – does it only work for Hyper-V virtual machines or with physical machines too? Can I use it with my non-Hyper-V VMs? I will first talk about the types of environments...

Configuring the “system under test” in VS The system under test for the purpose of this walkthrough is a simple calculator web service with its unit tests. Start by creating a new team project in VS. Connect to the TFS server and create a team project...

In the last post, we created the “system under test” and ensured that the TCM server has information on how to run these tests in a test environment. This post explains how to get the tests run automatically as part of a scheduled build / deploy / test...

Let’s look at an important application lifecycle management (ALM) scenario – end to end automation for building, deploying and testing a multi-tier application. Application deployment for a multi-tier application typically involves · provisioning of...

UPDATE: In Visual Studio 11, we have introduced rich support for creating physical environments (called as Standard Environments) and running build-deploy-test workflows on them. Check this blog post for details and to get started: http://blogs.msdn.com...

One of the common issues regularly faced by our users is how to test their application in both IE and Firefox. Visual Studio Lab Management can help in solving this issue for automated Coded UI test as part of Lab E2E Workflow flow. To accomplish this...

As you may be aware, Lab Management GDR is now available . In sync with this release, I am happy to announce that the VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 GDR in now available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt . What’s...

[Last updated on: Jan 3, 2011] As you plan to adopt VS Lab Management 2010 for managing your labs, you will probably have several questions on your mind such as: How many servers do I need? What kinds of servers should I buy? ...

Note: Cross posted from Nothing geeky... . Permalink The Lab management end-to-end workflow works leverages the Team Foundation Build Agent/Build Controllers to do the deployment. Given that build agent is primarily targeted for compiling sources...

Hello, I am Dinesh Bhat, test manager for the team that builds Visual Studio Lab Management product.  In his blog on dogfooding Visual Studio 2010 Test and Lab Management products , Amit Chatterjee talked about the team structure and how the product...

Technorati Tags: Lab Management , Virtual Machines , ALM , Environment This is first of a series of blogs we will be publishing over the next few weeks to cover breadth and depth of VSTS 2010 Lab Management. Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management...

I (Shay Mandel) have recently made a series of customer visits in Israel. I have met R&D managers, QA managers and CTOs from 3 ISVs/Start-Ups, 2 IT organizations (one large insurance company and one governmental department), and 2 MVPs - Guy Kolbis...

How are the virtual machines in a Lab Environment connected to each other and to other machines? Can I have physical hosts that are distributed across networks? What is the significance of network location in Team Foundation Administration Console? What...

In a previous post - Getting started with Lab Management (Part 4) , we saw how to deploy a simple application to a Lab Environment. In this post, I will describe how to add more realistic steps which may be required to deploy your application. For...

We have found that in some cases the registration of an upgraded build agents fails, with the following error: Error occurred while configuring TFSBuildServiceHost with Lab configuration. ExceptionType: MicrosoftTeamFoundation.Build.ClientBuildServiceHostAlreadyExistsException...

Upgrading TFS and Lab Management from Beta2 to RC requires a few steps. After working with several customers, we saw that a checklist of all the tasks can be helpful. So we created a checklist of all the general tasks required, and also created a tool...

In order to deploy your build and run your tests on a virtual environment, you need to enable the workflow and testing capabilities of the environment. To successfully configure these capabilities, you need to understand a few concepts and how different...

A QFE for Visual Studio 2010 testing tools, which fixes some important issues faced by customers, is now available.The full list of issues fixed by this QFE can be found here and you can download this patch here . Note that Service Pack 1 (Visual Studio...

If you are upgrading your VSTS 2008 server to VSTS 2010 Beta1, you will need to enable Lab Management for existing projects. Note: Starting Beta2 there is no need for these steps and they are part of the standard TFS upgrade. So, first upgrade your...

In an effort to reduce the number of places you need to search for ALM Content including Diagnostics, Testing and Lab Management we are combining these blogs to one location: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/ Come on over tell us what you...

Have an idea for the product and wondering what is the best way to report it? Think something is missing and you believe it absolutely has to be there? Well, we now have an avenue for you to add and vote for your favorite suggestions. The UserVoice...

I will try to address today a common query by lot of users of Visual Studio Lab Management on how to correctly run tests in different Lab Environments. This requirement can be achieved by making the test code read the Server names/other configuration...