Announcing release of my vNext build tasks as extensions in the VSTS/TFS Marketplace

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....

March 22, 2016 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Happy 10th Birthday TFS

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

March 18, 2016 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

New books on VSTS/TFS ALM DevOps

It has been a while since I have mentioned any had new books on TFS/VSTS, and just like buses a couple come along together. These two, one from Tarun Arora and the other from Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both nicely on trend for the big area of interest for many of the companies I am working with at present; best practice ‘cook book’ style guidance on how to best use the tools in an ALM process....

March 3, 2016 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

A vNext build task and PowerShell script to generate release notes as part of TFS vNext build.

Updated 22 Mar 2016: This task is now available as an extension in the VSTS marketplace A common request I get from clients is how can I create a custom set of release notes for a build? The standard TFS build report often includes the information required (work items and changesets/commits associate with the build) but not in a format that is easy to redistribute. So I decided to create a set to tools to try to help....

March 1, 2016 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

Using MSDeploy to deploy to nested virtual applications in Azure Web Apps

Azure provides many ways to scale and structure web site and virtual applications. I recently needed to deploy the following structure where each service endpoint was its own Visual Studio Web Application Project built as a MSDeploy Package http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service1 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service2 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service3 To do this in the Azure Portal in … Created a Web App for the site http://demo.azurewebsites.net This pointed to the disk location sitewwwoot, I disabled the folder as an application as there is not application running at this level Created a virtual directory api point to sitewwrootapi, again disabling this folder as an application Created a virtual application for each of my services, each with their own folder I knew from past experience I could use MSDeploy to deploy to the root site or the api virtual directory....

February 25, 2016 · 2 min · Richard Fennell