Our testing environments are based on TFS Lab Management, historically we have managed deployment into them manually (or at least via a PowerShell script run manually) or using TFS Build. I thought it time I at least tried to move over to Release Management. The process to install the components of Release Management is fairly straight forward, there are wizards that ask little other than which account to run as Install the deployment server, pointing at a SQL instance Install the management client, pointing at the deployment server Install the deployment agent on each box you wish to deploy to, again pointing it as the deployment server I hit a problem with the third step. Our lab environments are usually network isolated, hence each can potentially be running their own copies of the same domain. This means the connection from the deployment agent to the deployment server is cross domain. We don’t want to setup cross domain trusts as ...

Background The TFS Community Build Extensions provide many activities to enhance your build. One we use a lot is the one for StyleCop to enforce code consistency in projects as part of our check in & build process. In most projects you will not want a single set of StyleCop rules to be applied across the whole solution. Most teams will require a higher level of ‘rule adherence’ for production code as opposed to unit test code. By this I don’t mean the test code is ‘lower quality’, just that rules will differ e.g. we don’t require XML documentation blocks on unit test methods as the unit test method names should be documentation enough. ...

Rik has just done a post on upgrading our SCVMM 2012 instance we use with Lab Management to 2012 R2, a good few gotchas in there as you might expect. Well worth a read

I have just had a guest blog post published on the Microsoft UK Developers site ‘Migrating a TFS TFVC based team project to a Git team project retaining as much source and work item history as possible’. It discusses alternatives to using TFS Integration Platform to migrate source code and associated work items.

A clarification blog post I wrote on what to do if you have multiple SCVMM servers in your network and want to use TFS Lab Management has just been published on the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management blog. For more information on best practices with TFS Lab Management have a look at the ALM Rangers guide

There is a call for speakers for DDD South West on the 17th of May in Bristol. I have submitted as proposal, are you going to? For more details see http://www.dddsouthwest.com/ 

There have been significant changes in the DB schema between TFS 2010 and 2013. This means that as part of an in-place upgrade process a good deal of data needs to be moved around. Some of this is done as part of the actual upgrade process, but to get you up and running quicker, some is done post upgrade using SQL SPROCs. Depending how much data there is to move this can take a while, maybe many hours. This is the cause the SQL load. ...

While I have been on holiday there have been a few ALM Rangers releases. I am particularly happy to see the Lab Management Guide … v3 update guidance is available, as this was a project I was working on. The big change from previous editions is that it covers setting up Lab Management to make use of Azure IaaS resources. So if you use TFS have a look at http://aka.ms/vsarsolutions for a full list of resources ...

Update 2/4/2014 – Added notes about using service accounts as opposed to machine accounts for the AppPool running the web service In the past I have posted on how to get Kerberos running for multi tier applications. Well as usual when I had to redeploy the application onto new hardware I found my notes were not as clear as I would have hoped. So here is what is meant to be a walkthrough for getting our application working in our TFS lab environment. ...

I am speaking at Gravitas’s Tech Talk #3 - “TFS & Visual Studio 2013 vs The Rest” on Tuesday march the 4th about “Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle product has had a lot of changes in the past couple of years. In this session will look at how it can be used provide a complete solution from project inception through development, testing and deployment for project both using Microsoft and other vendor technologies” ...