Blog de Joe Freeman

This blog describes how to run the Microsoft TFS/ALM Hyper-V virtual machine in one of the VMWare hypervisors (Player/Workstation/Fusion). You can use the same concepts for any other virtual machine/appliance. The 2013 RTM  ALM image comes with a set of TFS and Visual studio labs .  The virtual machine and the labs  have a couple expectations: It comes as a a Hyper-V VHD running an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2012. The work items and other information are "point in time" information.  This means sprint, iteration or other information can only be used in the labs if the VMs time is set to a specific date(s).  The machine resets the time to the same specific date and time on every reboot. This lets you re-run the exercises.  Pay attention to the places the way the time is set if you wish to use this process for Virtual Machines anchored at dates and times other than the ones used for the TFS 2013 RTM ALM image used in this post. The labs work bes...

Background Code Analysis (CA) is a very useful Visual Studio feature that applies good practice type static code analysis to your code base.  You can run CA manually at any time or configure it to run automatically on each build. Automatic execution can be configured per configuration per project. This means you can enable automatic CA on Release builds while ignoring it during builds in Debug mode.  Some teams do this to speed up the debug compilation cycle.  I'm not sure what in CA makes it so slow that you can't run it all the time :-( You can view which CA rules apply for any configuration or CPU type via the Solution Properties window: You can set the automatic execution of CA on a per project basis in the Code Analysis pane of the Project Properties: The method of Code Analysis  menu item and the position of the results varies by Visual Studio Version. The menu item that executes CA is located on the Build  menu in VS2013. Unexpected Beh...