An extraordinary day.

“Sad, funny, thoughtful, thankful”

I wrote that on Facebook this afternoon after having returned from Eudunda where I had the honour and privilege of farewelling the father of a dear friend.

Max was a much loved husband, father and grand-father. It was great to see so many people come together today at his funeral to pay their respects and celebrate his life.

I did not know Max that well, but to hear the story of his life today, and see his legacy in his four daughters and their families was both moving and inspiring.

A man of faith and integrity.

It gives you pause to consider that when it’s your turn:

• what will people say about you?
• will people still know how to make the jelly cakes, slices, curried-egg sandwiches, party pies and other assorted delights you find at the afternoon tea?

Chris Testa-O'Neill on Increasing Business and IT collaboration with SQL Server

I was one of the few who braved the 39°C heat outside to hear Chris Testa-O’Neill (@ctesta_oneill) speak at this month’s Adelaide SQL Server User Group. Great to have Chris back in Adelaide again.

It proved to be a really interesting presentation about what BI tools are now available, and what tools are appropriate for what problems.

• Reporting Services
• Report Builder
• PowerView
• PowerPivot

The talk concluded with a nice demonstration of setting up PowerPivot in Excel, highlighting what could be achieved by a business ‘power user’, and what areas they would require assistance from a BI expert.

We also met in a different room from normal which I think most people thought was a better space. Plus (as you may observe in the photo above), it has a grand piano – I’m sure we could find a use for that somehow!

TFS Best Practice Analyzer failing with "%TFSServerURLValidated%

I’ve been having trouble running the Team Foundation Server Best Practise Analyser (TfsBpa for short). It was failing with the following warning:

Cannot validate the URL provided The scan was generated using the corrected URL “%TFSServerURLValidated%”.

I noticed in the “Other Reports” section that it listed the following additional errors:

23:03:07.351: Exception resetting Execution Policy in TFS PowerShell Object Processor: System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException Access to the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell’ is denied. at System.Management.Automation.Internal.PipelineProcessor.SynchronousExecuteEnumerate(Object input, Hashtable errorResults, Boolean enumerate) at System.Management.Automation.PipelineNode.Execute(Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) at System.Management.Automation.StatementListNode.ExecuteStatement(ParseTreeNode statement, Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) System.Management.Automation Script

Hmm.. I wonder if it’s a problem related to PowerShell’s execution policy setting?

I ran the following in an elevated PowerShell prompt:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

And that’s fixed it – now the BPA process runs as expected. Yay!