The Problem The documentation for the VSTS WIKI suggests you can embed a video in a VSTS WIKI using the markdown/HTML``` Problem is that this does not seem to work, the MP4 just does not appear, you get an empty video player. However, if you swap to a full URL it does work e.g. ### The Workaround The workaround is to either place the MP4 file in some URL accessible location e....

When you want to register a build agent with VSTS, you use the VSTS instance’s URL and a user’s Personal Access Token (PAT). Whilst doing this today I connected to the VSTS instance OK but got the error “Agent pool not found”.when I was asked to pick the agent pool to add the new agent to. As the user who’s PAT I was using was a Build Administrator I was a bit confused, but then I remembered to check their user access level....

You have always been able to customise your Team Projects in TFS, by editing a host of XML files, but it was not a pleasant experience. In VSTS a far more pleasant to use web based inherited customisation model was added, much to, I think, most administrators relief. If you used the TFS DB migration service you ended up with a VSTS instance full of the the XML style team projects, and you were stuck there, with no way to change these to the new inherited mode, that is until now as Microsoft have released to preview a conversion tool....

I have just rebuilt my first generation Surface Book from our company standard Windows image. These images are used by all our staff all the time without issue (on Surface and Lenovo devices), so I was not expecting any problems. I used to rebuild my PC every 6 months or so, but got out the habit when I moved to a model I could not swap the hard drive out of as backup during the process (using a new disk for new install)....

Updated 3 July 2018 - A colleague, Andy Davidson, suggested mRemoteNG as an alternative tool to this address this issue. mRemoteNG also has the advantage that it support most major remoting technologies not just RDP, so I am giving that a try for a while. This is one of those post I do mostly for myself so I don’t forget how I did something, it is all based on answers on SuperUser....

Whilst writing some training material for VSTS I hit a problem creating a TFVC workspace. I was using VS2017, linking a TFVC Repo to a local folder. I was connecting to the VSTS instance using an MSA. In Team Explorer, when I came to do a ‘Map & Get’ to map the source locations I got a ‘TF14061: The workspace ws_1_18;Project Collection Build Service does not exist’ error Strange error, which I could see no obvious reason for....

There are still a few spaces left at the Yorkshire Global DevOps BootCamp Venue hosted at Black Marble Come and learn about all things cool in DevOps, including Video keynote by Microsoft Local keynote: Breaking down the Monolith Hackathon/HandsOn DevOps challenges. The hands-on part with be based on a common application where we try to solve as many challenges as possible, including ideas like How to containerize an existing application How to add telemetry (app insights) to the application and gather hypothesis information How to use telemetry to monitor availability How to use feature toggles to move application into production without disrupting end users How to use release gates How to make DB schema changes Use Blue Green Deployments And there is free lunch too!...

In the past I have blog on the subject of using advanced unit test mocking tools to ‘mock the unmockable’. It is an interesting question to revisit; how important today are units tests where this form of complex mocking is required? Of late I have certainly seen a bit of a move towards using more functional style tests; still using unit test frameworks, but relying on APIs as access points with real backend systems such as DBs and WebServices being deployed as test environments....

Background I have a VSTS build extension that can apply a VSTS generated build number to Android APK packages. This takes a VSTS build number and generates, and applies, the Version Name (a string) and Version Code (an integer) to the APK file manifest. The default parameters mean that the behaviour of this task is to assume (using a regular expression) the VSTS build number has at least three fields major....

Today I have released a major new release, V2, of my VSTS Cross Platform Extension to build release notes. This new version is all down to the efforts of Greg Pakes who has completely re-written the task to use newer VSTS APIs. A minor issue is that this re-write has introduced a couple of breaking changes, as detailed below and on the project wiki oAuth script access has to be enabled on the agent running the task There are minor changes in the template format, but for the good, as it means both TFVC and GIT based releases now use a common template format....