Speaking at the SharePoint Usergroup (Leeds) on Modern ALM & DevOps

Pleased to say I’m presenting on DevOps with VSTS at the SharePoint UG in Leeds on the 7th of March To register have a look at the Usergroup’s events site

February 13, 2017 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

You never know how people will use a tool

You never know how people will use a tool once it is out ‘in the wild’. I wrote my Generate Release Notes VSTS extension to generate markdown files, but people have attempted to use it in other ways. I realised, via an issue raised on Github, that it can also be used, without any code changes, to generate other formats such as HTML. The only change required is to provide an HTML based template as opposed to markdown one....

February 7, 2017 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

How you can keep using Lab Management after a move to VSTS (after a fashion)

I have posted on previously how we used TFS Lab Management to provision our test and development environments. With our move to VSTS, where Lab Management does not exist, we needed to look again at how to provision these labs. There are a few options… Move to the Cloud – aka stop using Lab Management Arguably the best option is to move all your lab VMs up to the cloud. Microsoft even has the specific service to help with this Azure DevTest Labs....

February 6, 2017 · 6 min · Richard Fennell

I’m on @techstringy podcast talking on #DevOps

I recorded a podcast on DevOps with Paul Stringfellow @techstringy last weeks Black Marble event. It has just been published on his blog

February 6, 2017 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

New version of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in now supports VS2017 too

I have just published Version 1.5 of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in . After much fiddling this VSIX now supports VS2017 as well as VS2013 and VS2015. The complexity was that VS2017 uses a new VSIX format, V3. You have to makes changes to the project that generates the VSIX and to the VSIX manifest too. The FAQ says you can do this within VS2015 my hand, but I had no luck getting it right....

January 29, 2017 · 2 min · Richard Fennell