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. Could not login to OneDrive getting a script error https://auth.gfx.ms/16.000.26657.00/DefaultLogin_Core.js ...

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. Though ‘Devils with Arms and Cats’ is maybe a good term for DevOps? ...

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. Commonly called ReflectedWorkItemId ...

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. SmartRunner can run on both Shared and On Premises Agents ...

I have been having a look at Docker for Windows recently. I have been experiencing a problem that when I create a new image the created date/time (as shown with docker images) is 8 hours in the past. Turns out the problem seems to be due to putting my Windows 10 laptop into sleep mode. So the process to see the problem is Create a new Docker image – the create date is correct, the current time Sleep the PC Wake up the PC Check the create date, it is now 8 hours off in the past Now the create date is not an issue in itself, but the fact that the time within the Docker images is also off by 8 hours can be, especially when trying to connect to cloud based services. I needed to sort it out ...

The registration link for Microsoft UK TechDays Online is now live. This is a 5 day event live broadcast from the Microsoft Campus in Reading. You will be able to view the sessions live at https://channel9.msdn.com/ The themes for each day are: Monday, 12 September: Explore the world of Data Platform and BOTs Tuesday, 13 September: DevOps in practice Wednesday, 14 September: A day at the Office! Thursday, 15 September: The inside track on Azure and UK Datacenter Friday, 16 September: Find out more about Artificial Intelligence I am doing a session on the Thursday on Azure DevTest Labs. ...

I recently posted on how we were versioning our Nuget packages as part of a release pipeline. In test we noticed that the packages being produced by this process has an extra folder inside them. We expected there to be a netcore50 folder, but not a .NETCore50 folder. Strangely if we build the package locally we only saw the expect netcore50 folder. The addition of this folder did not appear to be causing any problem, but I did want to find out why it had appeared and remove it as it was not needed. ...