I was lucky enough to attended and be on a panel at yesterdays WinOps London conference, it was a different and very interesting view on DevOps for me. I spend most of my time consulting with test and development teams, with these teams it is very rare to come across a team not using source control and they commonly have some form of automated build too. This means any DevOps discussion usually come from the side of ‘how can I extend my build into deployment…’. ...

If you wish to migrate work items from TFS to VSTS your options are limited. You can of course just pull over work items, without history, using Excel. If you have no work item customisation them OpsHub is an option, but if you have work item customisation then you are going to have to use TFS Integration Platform. And we all know what a lovely experience that is! Note: TFS Integration Platform will cease to be supported by Microsoft at the end of May 2016, this does not mean the tool is going away, just that there will be no support via forums. ...

I am pleased to announce that I have just made public on the VSTS marketplace a new version of my VSTS Generate Release Notes extension. This new version now supports both VSTS/TFS vNext Builds and vNext Releases. The previous versions only supported the generation of release notes as part of a build. The adding of support for release has meant I have had to rethink the internals of how the templates is process as well as the way templates are passed into the task and where results are stored ...

Updated: 5th Aug 2016 added notes in PublisherID I have been developing a few VSTS/TFS build related extensions and have published a few in the VSTS marketplace. This has all been a somewhat manual process, a mixture of Gulp and PowerShell has helped a bit, but I decided it was time to try to do a more formal approach. To do this I have used Jesse Houwing’s VSTS Extension Tasks. Even with this set of tasks I am not sure what I have is ‘best practice’, but it does work. The doubt is due to the way the marketplace handles revisions and preview flags. What I have works for me, but ‘your mileage may differ’ ...

I have just completed the upgrade of our Blog Server to BlogEngine 3.3. This upgrade is a bit more complex than the usual upgrade as between 3.2 to 3.3 there is a change to Razor views for all the widgets. This means you need to remove all the old widgets you have and re-add them using the new razor equivalents. As our blog is backed by SQL, this mean a SQL script to clear down the old widgets, then a manual add of the new versions on each blog we have on our server. One point to note, if using SQL you do need to get BlogEngine 3.3 from its GitHub repo (at the time of writing, I am sure this will change) as after the formal 3.3 release on CodePlex there is a fix for an issue that stopped the editing of widget properties. ...

Tracking the current version of StyleCop is a bit awkward. Last week I got an automated email from CodePlex saying 4.7.52.0 had been released . I thought this was the most up to date version, so upgraded my StyleCop command line wrapper and my VSTS StyleCop task from 4.7.47.0 to 4.7.52.0. However, I was wrong about the current version. I had not realised that the StyleCop team had forked the code onto GitHub. GitHub is now the home of the Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6 development of StyleCop, while Codeplex remains the home of the legacy Visual Studio versions. I had only upgraded to a legacy patch version, not the current version. ...

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