In preparation for my Techdays session next month, I have been sorting demos using the various Release Management clients. When I tried to create a release from within Visual Studio using the ‘Release Management tools for Visual Studio I found I could not add my Azure subscriptions. I saw the error ‘An unexpected error occurred. Close the windows and try again’ I could download and import the subscription file, it showed the available storage accounts, but when I pressed save I got the rather unhelpful error ‘Object reference not set to an instance of an object’ ...

If the reason you have not been using VSO was concern over where it is hosted, then last week Microsoft made an announcement that could ease some of your worries, or at least your legal departments. VSO now has ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses; for more details see Brian Harry’s blog. This added to the fact that since the end of last October you have been able to choose to host your VSO instance in Europe could well make VSO a more compelling option for many organisations who don’t want to have their own TFS servers on premises ...

One of my blog posts has been re-posted on the Microsoft UK Developers blog Resolving the DCS two-step - Release Management vNext deployment This post covers part of what I will be talking about at Microsoft Techdays on the 5th of February . You can register here for this free online event

On the 5th of February I will be presenting at Microsoft’s online Techdays event. My session is entitled ‘How are you going to deploy that? A look at configuration as code’ “It does not matter what platform you are developing for, you are going to have to deploy your product in the end. Too often in the past the question of deployment has been an afterthought. But it need not be this way, there are tools available that can help with deployment of your code and importantly the provisioning the underlying systems they need too. In this session we will look at Visual Studio Release Management’s vNext release pipeline seeing how it can leverage Desired State Configuration to provision environments and deploy applications” ...

I have posted in the past that we have a number of agent based deployments using Release Management 2013.4 that point to network isolated Lab Management environments. Over Christmas we did some maintenance on our underlying Hyper-V servers, so everything got fully stopped and restarted. When the network isolated environment were restarted their DHCP assigned IP addresses on our company domain all changed (maybe we should have had longer DHCP lease times set?) ...

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of the DSC module the error was “cannot be loaded because you opted not to run this software now”. The other project just suffered mixed .NET assembly loading errors. ...

If you are trying to use Release Management or any deployment tool with a network isolated Lab Management setup you will have authentication issues. Your isolated domain is not part of your production domain, so you have to provide credentials. In the past this meant Shadow Accounts or the simple expedient of running a NET USE at the start of your deployment script to provide a login to the drops location. In Release Management 2013.4 we get a new option to address this issue if you are using DSC based deployment. This is Deploy from a build drop using a shared UNC path. In this model the Release Management server copies the contents of the drops folder to a known share and passes credentials to access it down to the DSC client (you set these as parameters on the server). ...

The DCS two step When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management is involved. Colin Dembovsky did an excellent pair of posts on getting Release Management working with DSC based vNext templates. The core of the first post is that he made use of the Script DSC resource to run SQLPackage.EXE and MSDeploy to do the actual deployment of a system as well as using it to manage the transformation of the configuration files in his MSDeploy package. ...

Whilst helping a Java based team (part of larger organisation that used many sets of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools) to migrate from Subversion to TFS I had to tackle their Jenkins/Ant based builds. They could have stayed on Jenkins and switched to the TFS source provider, but they wanted to at least look at how TFS build would better allow them to trace their builds against TFS work items. All went well, we setup a build controller and agent specifically for their team and installed Java onto it as well the TFS build extensions. We were very quickly able to get our test Java project building on the new build system. ...

As with many concepts it is not the the idea that is hard but it’s application. ‘Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories’ by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides some great tips to apply the concept of user stories to real world problems. Highlighting where they work and where they don’t, and what you can do about it. I think this book is well worth a read for anyone, irrespective of their role in a team; it’s short chapters (usually a couple of pages per idea) means it easy to pickup and put down when you get a few minutes. Perfect for that commute ...