Microsoft Test Manager crashes when adding requirement

Having decided to use TFS 2010 as our build system and source control, we decided to use Microsoft's Testing Suite to manage testing given that it is tightly integrated with TFS 2010. I was a tester in a former life and i have to say, I really like the principles behind Microsoft Test Manager and the Testing Center application - it is lightyears ahead of the implementation they used in previous versions of Visual Studio/TFS, however, there is a substancial and somewhat ironic problem: Microsoft's Testing Suite in it's current guise is buggy as hell! It's a great tool but could really have done with some more testing ;)

Anyway, the problem at hand - we had some requirements in our TFS system and we tried linking them to Test Suites created in the Testing Center, every time we tried this, the program bombed out. I did some digging and it looks like we had been using the wrong paradigm - the requirements are expected to be held in User Stories rather than as Tasks. We created a dummy user story, tried attaching it to the suite and it worked first time, yay!

Here is the link that helped me resolve the issue:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vsmantest/thread/adbd5a30-7e76-4c6b-8bc3-7dbc9362f964

I'm quietly hopeful about this tool - of all the management tools i've used, i really like the concept and structre of Microsoft's offering, but it could really do with some more testing before it's ready to go into the big bad world. Fingers crossed a combination of research and bug fixing will iron out our problems with it

The Glorious Monster: Fixing BizTalk ENTSSO Failure on Windows Vista

A link back to an incredibly useful post by the Glorious Monster. I encountered this problem after having installed .net4 on our Biztalk server. I advise taking note of Giuseppe Dimauro's comment - if you are running in an x64 environment like ourselves, you need to run regasm from the 'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\' directory

The Glorious Monster: Fixing BizTalk ENTSSO Failure on Windows Vista

My final prompt looked like this:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727>regasm "C:\Program Files\Common
Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On\SSOSQL.dll"

Once again, massive thanks to The Glorious Monster for saving my ass today!

Can't deploy a WCF Service App from Visual Studio into IIS 7

One of the problems i encountered when trying to deploy a WCF Service App was this little doozie:

'Cannot add duplicate collection entry of type 'add' with unique key attribute 'name' set to 'ScriptHandlerFactory''

I got around it by adding the following line into the <handlers> tag of the tag in my web.config file and redeploying:

< remove name="ScriptHandlerFactory"/>
< remove name="ScriptHandlerFactoryAppServices"/>
< remove name="ScriptResource"/>

Also, this line at the BEGINNING of the <modules> tag :

< remove name="ScriptModule"/>

That seemed to fix it for me!

Dude, where are my WCF Data Classes?

I encountered an annoying quirk about the current implementation of WCF today - I created a class which had a data contract, saved, built and published my project and updated the service reference in my client to make sure it had all been deployed properly. On viewing the contents of the service in the object browser, my newly created class was not there! Why?!? The reason is that The data contract is deemed worth publishing unless something is using the thing. So, to get around the problem, i created a function that called used the data class, rebuilt/published and hey presto! it appeared in my list of available classes.

Orchestrations not appearing available after deploying application to Biztalk 2009

This is an annoying quirk I found when having multiple Biztalk applications running on the one server. I created a little app, built it and tried deploying it via the Biztalk WCF Service deployment wizard - when prompted for the application to deploy to, i specified the biztalk app container i had created in the BizTalk Server Administration console earlier and finished the wizard. The wizard completed sucessfully but i found myself puzzled as to why, when i went into the console and clicked on Orchestrations, my Orchestrations didn't appear, huh? The wizard hadn't thrown any errors?

In addition to specifying the App container to use in the WCF Service Publish wizard, you also need to specify the Biztalk Application Container in the properties of the biztalk project at the Visual Studio end - right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and choose the 'Deployment' tab in the page that is displayed:

Make sure the Application name matches the same name of your Biztalk Application and try redeploying via the wizard and your orchestrations should now appear as expected.

A simple BizTalk 2009 Project

So, you've managed to convince BizTalk 2009 to install on your computer, what now? If, like me, you found yourself feeling cold and alone in the world of Microsoft's BPM server, I suggest you try following the instructions here to create a simple BizTalk Client-Server Application:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rgarg/archive/2007/11/19/exposing-biztalk-orchestration-as-wcf-service.aspx

If i had time, I would put together a similar guide with screenshots but, for the moment, this will take you a long way to getting you first BizTalk project working. Good luck!