Whilst working with the new Release Management features in VSTS/TFS 2015.2 I found I needed to pass in configuration variables i.e. server name, Db name, UID and Password to create a SQL server via an Azure Resource Management Template release step and a connection string to the same SQL instance for a web site’s web.config, set using an MSDeploy release step using token replacement (as discussed in this post) Now I could just create RM configuration variables for both the connection string and ARM settings, ...

There is no easy way to work out how long a TFS in place upgrade will take, there are just too many factors to make any calculation reasonable Start and end TFS version Quality/Speed of hardware Volume of source code Volume of work items Volume of work item attachments The list goes on…. The best option I have found to a graph various upgrades I have done and try to make an estimate based in the shape of the curve. I did this for 2010 > 2013 upgrades, and now I think I have enough data from upgrades of sizable TFS instances to do the same for 2013 to 2015. ...

In the past I have posted about the vNext TFS build tasks I have made available via my GitHub repo. Over the past few weeks I have been making an effort to repackage these as extensions in the new VSTS/TFS Marketplace, thus making them easier to consume in VSTS or using the new extensions support in TFS 2015.2 This it is an ongoing effort, but I pleased to announce the release of the first set of extension. ...

Did you know TFS was 10 years old this week? I have been working with TFS all that time, doesn’t time fly, and wow has the product changed from TFS 2005 to 2015/VSTS or what. If you want to find out a bit more about the past 10 years try listening to the latest Radio TFS podcast with Brian Harry

It has been a while since I have mentioned any had new books on TFS/VSTS, and just like buses a couple come along together. These two, one from Tarun Arora and the other from Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both nicely on trend for the big area of interest for many of the companies I am working with at present; best practice ‘cook book’ style guidance on how to best use the tools in an ALM process. ...

Updated 22 Mar 2016: This task is now available as an extension in the VSTS marketplace A common request I get from clients is how can I create a custom set of release notes for a build? The standard TFS build report often includes the information required (work items and changesets/commits associate with the build) but not in a format that is easy to redistribute. So I decided to create a set to tools to try to help. ...

Azure provides many ways to scale and structure web site and virtual applications. I recently needed to deploy the following structure where each service endpoint was its own Visual Studio Web Application Project built as a MSDeploy Package http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service1 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service2 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service3 To do this in the Azure Portal in … Created a Web App for the site http://demo.azurewebsites.net This pointed to the disk location sitewwwoot, I disabled the folder as an application as there is not application running at this level Created a virtual directory api point to sitewwrootapi, again disabling this folder as an application Created a virtual application for each of my services, each with their own folder ...

**Updated 22 Mar 2016 **This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace If you are using Pester to unit test your PowerShell code then there is a good chance you will want to include it in your automated build process. To do this, you need to get Pester installed on your build machine. The usual options would be Manual install from GitHub Install via Chocolaty Install via Nuget If you own the build agent VM then any of these options are good, you can even write the NuGet restore into your build process itself. However there is a problem, both the first two options need administrative access as they put the Pester module in the $PSModules folder (under ‘Program Files’); so these can’t be used on VSTS’s hosted build system, where your are not an administrator So this means you are left with copying the module (and associated functions folder) to some local working folder and running it manually; but do you really want to have to store the Pester module in your source repo? My solution was to write a vNext build tasks to deploy the Pester files and run the Pester tests. The task takes two parameters ...

With the advent of TFS 2015.2 RC (and the associated VSTS release) we have seen the short term removal of the ‘External TFS Build’ option for the Release Management artifacts source. This causes me a bit of a problem as I wanted to try out the new on premises vNext based Release Management features on 2015.2, but don’t want to place the RC on my production server (though there is go live support). Also the ability to get artifacts from an on premises TFS instance when using VSTS open up a number of scenarios, something I know some of my clients had been investigating. ...

Brian Harry has done a couple of very interesting posts (post 1 and post 2) on the recent outages of the VSTS service. Whether you use VSTS or not they make interesting reading for anyone who is involved in running SaaS based systems, or anything at scale. From the posts the obvious reading is you cannot under estimate the importance of in production montoring having an response plan doing a proper root cause analysis and putting steps in place to stop the problem happening again Well worth a read ...