Updates 28th Nov 2017: Also see this second post Creating a VSTS build agent on an Azure DevLabs Windows Server VM with no GUI - Using Artifacts 30th Nov 2017: Also see associated post Announcing a new VSTS Extension for Starting and Stopping Azure DevTest Labs VMs As I posted recently I have been trying to add more functional tests to the VSTS based release CI/CD pipeline for my VSTS Extensions, and as I noted depending on how you want to run your tests e....

Reporting has always been important for software development, simply put the ability to know what has been done, and what remains to be done. For many teams the out the box reporting within TFS/VSTS dashboards has been enough e.g. sprint burndowns and kanban charts etc. Also TFS has always had SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) to provide rich reporting on a whole host of areas; though in my experience few clients use the out the box reports or customise their own reports....

As time passes I have found there is a need for more cross platform VSTS extensions as there is more uptake of VSTS beyond it’s historic Microsoft platform based roots. Historically most of my extensions have been Powershell based. Now this is not a fundamental problem for cross platform usage. this is due to the availability of Powershell Core. However, Typescript and Node.JS is a better fit I think in many cases....

BlogEngine.Net has served us well as a blogging platform for a good few years. However, it is no longer under active support, so it is time to move on, too much risk of future security issues to ignore the lack of support. After a bit of thought we decided on WordPress as a replacement. OK this has had its own history of problems, but it has an active community and is well supported and in the Azure Marketplace....

Whilst doing some NPM build work for VSTS Extensions I kept getting intermittent EPERM errors about renaming Windows files during NPM install (as discussed on GitHub)l. When you get this it completely blocks any development. As the Github issue discusses there are many possible reasons for this issue, and many proposed potential solutions. However the only one that worked for me was to restart VS Code; as this appeared to be locking the node_modules folder somehow....