One type of feature I hate people demoing in any IDE, especially Visual Studio, is the ‘just click here to publish to live from the developers PC’. This is just not good practice, we want to encourage a good DevOps process with Source Control Automated build Automated release with approvals The problem is, this can all be a bit much for people, it takes work and knowledge, and that right click is just too tempting....

I am often asked asked ‘How can I move my TFS installation to VSTS?’ In the past the only real answer I had was the consultant’s answer ‘it depends’. There were options, but they all ended up losing fidelity i.e. that the history of past changes got removed or altered in some manner. For many companies the implication of such changes meant they stayed on-premises; with all the regular backups, updates and patch running the use of any on-premises service entails....

What are the changes in allowed email addresses in MSAs? You may or may not have noticed that there has been a recent change in LiveID (or Microsoft Account MSA as they are now called). In the past you could create a MSA using an existing email address e.g. richard@mydomain.co.uk . This is no longer an option. If you try to create a new MSA with a non Microsoft (outlook.com/hotmal.com) email they are blocked saying ‘This email is part of a reserved domain....

Whilst I have been on holiday my PC has been switched off and in a laptop bag. This did not seem to stopped me getting problems when I tried to use it again… Outlook could not sync to O365 – turns out there had been some changes in our hybrid Exchange infrastructure, I just need to restart/patch the PC on our company LAN to pick up all the new group policy settings etc....

I have been on holiday in Nepal for a couple of weeks; trekking to Annapurna Base Camp Whilst I was ‘off the grid’ a video I made on using the tools within VSTS to build a DevOps pipeline got published on Channel9 Hope you find it useful Note to myself: In the future I must make sure I have my eyes open for the landing screen. - Now fixed thanks to the CH9 curators

Great day at DDDNorth yesterday, hope everyone enjoyed it. Thanks to all the team who helped during the preparation and on the day. The slides from Rik Hepworth and my presentation on ‘_Living the dream - Real world DevOps with Azure and VSTS’ are up at Github. _ We were a late stand in session to cover for a presenter who could not attend on the day. So I hope it was not too much of let down, that we were not the speaker on the agenda, covered a different subject and did not match the title the spell checker converted out session title too....

The video of my session at TechDays online is now available on Channel9, along with all the TechDay Online UK content Enjoy…

Updated 27 Sep 2016: Added solutions to known issues Background As I have posted many times we make use of TFS Lab Management to provide network isolated dev/test environments. Going forward I see us moving to Azure Dev Labs and/or Azure Stack with ARM templates, but that isn’t going to help me today, especially when I have already made the investment in setting up a Lab Management environments and they are ready to use....

The process customisation options in VSTS are now fairly extensive. You can add fields, states and custom items, making VSTS is ‘very possible’ option for many more people. As well as the obvious uses of this customisation such as storing more data or matching your required process, customisation can also aid in migrating work items into VSTS from other VSTS instances, or on-premises TFS. Whether using TFS Integration (now with no support – beware) or Martin Hinshelwood’s vsts-data-bulk-editor (an active open source solution so probably a much better choice for most people) as mentioned in my past post you need to add a custom field on the target VSTS server to contain the original work item ID....

Typemock have just released an official VSTS build extension to run Typemock Isolator based tests. Given there is now an official extension I have decided to deprecate mine, it is still available in the Marketplace but I would recommend using the official one The new Typemock extension includes two tasks SmartRunner Task The SmartRunner is a unit test runner, that can run nunit and mstest based tests. It handles the deployment of Typemock Isolator....