I did an event yesterday on using the TFS Database Import Service to do migrations from on premises TFS to VSTS. During the presentation I discussed some of the other migration options available. Not everyone needs a high fidelity migration, bring everything over. Some teams may want to just bring over their current source or just a subset of their source. Maybe they are making a major change in work practices and want to start anew on VSTS. To try to give an idea of the options I have produced this flow chart to help with the choices ...

This is one of those posts I do as a reminder to myself. I have struggled to get debugging working in VSCode for Typescript files. If I set breakpoints in the underlying generated JavaScript they worked, but did not work if they were set in the Typescript source file. There are loads of walkthroughs and answers on Stackoverflow, but all with that vital little bit (for me) missing. So this is what I needed to do for my usage scenario… ...

I have just released a new version of my VSTS Manifest Version Extension (1.5.22). This adds two new tasks to the set of versioning tasks in the extension. The complete set now is VersionAssemblies - sets the version in the assemblyinfo.cs or .vb (used pre build) VersionDotNetCoreAssemblies - sets the version in the *.csproj (used pre build) - cross platform VersionAPPX - sets the version in the Package.appxmanifest (used pre build) VersionVSIX - sets the version in the source.extension.vsixmanifest (used pre build) VersionDacpac - sets the version in a SQL DACPAC (used post build) VersionNuspec - sets the version in a Nuget Nuspec file (used pre packing) VersionSharePoint - sets the version in a SharePoint 2013/2016/O365 Add-In VersionWix - sets the version in a Wix Project As with all the other tasks, these new tasks aim to find files recursively to update with a version number extracted from the build number ...

Background If you are creating VSTS build extensions you will need to get the build or release’s PAT token if you wish to call the VSTS REST API. This is done using a call like this (Node) import tl = require('vsts-task-lib/task'); var auth = tl.getEndpointAuthorization('SYSTEMVSSCONNECTION', false); if (auth.scheme === 'OAuth') { var token = auth.parameters\['AccessToken'\]; or (PowerShell) $vssEndPoint = Get-ServiceEndPoint -Name "SystemVssConnection" -Context $distributedTaskContext $personalAccessToken = $vssEndpoint.Authorization.Parameters.AccessToken You pop the resultant PAT into the headers of your REST web request and you are away and running. ...

Rik Hepworth and myself have been doing our ‘Living the Dream – Real world DevOps with VSTS and ARM’ at a good few events over the past few months. We now, at last, have a recording of a version of it up on Black Marble YouTube Channel’s DevOps Playlist Enjoy….

There are still spaces available at the Black Marble hosted venue for the Global DevOps Bootcamp on the 17th of June If you are interested register here

Do you find your TFS server gets forgotten? It is not owned by the IT department and the Development team don’t have the time to support it fully, it never gets patched or upgrades? Or maybe you are adopting a cloud first strategy for all you systems? Well maybe it is time to consider moving your on-premises TFS instance to VSTS? On the 9th of May at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Leeds I will be presenting at a Black Marble /Microsoft event where we will be looking at Microsoft’s new high fidelity VSTS database import tools that can be used to move a TFS instance to VSTS. ...

Rik and myself had a great time fun last night chatting all things ALM and DevOps with Greg Duncan on RadioTFS show 136. I was amazed it was a year since I was last on. The Podcast is now up at http://radiotfs.com/Show/136 , why not have a listen

My Generate Release Notes VSTS extension has been my most popular by a long way. I have enhanced it, with the help of others via pull requests, but there have been two repeating common questions that have not been resolved Is it cross platform? Why does it show different work items and commit associations to the VSTS Release Status UI? Well the answer to the first is that the core of the logic for the extension came from a PowerShell script we used internally, so PowerShell was the obvious first platform, especially as though my PowerShell skills are not great, my Node was weaker! ...

I have been working on a new Node.JS based VSTS Build Extension, so loads of Node learning going on as it is a language I have not done much with in the past. I expect to get caught out in places, but I have just wasted a good few hours on this one! I am working in VS Code using Typescript to generate my Node based task. Whilst hacking around I have been just running the script in the VS Code debugger, getting the logic right before packaging it up and testing within a VSTS Build extension. ...