**Updated 22 Mar 2016 **This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace If you are using Pester to unit test your PowerShell code then there is a good chance you will want to include it in your automated build process. To do this, you need to get Pester installed on your build machine. The usual options would be Manual install from GitHub Install via Chocolaty Install via Nuget If you own the build agent VM then any of these options are good, you can even write the NuGet restore into your build process itself....

With the advent of TFS 2015.2 RC (and the associated VSTS release) we have seen the short term removal of the ‘External TFS Build’ option for the Release Management artifacts source. This causes me a bit of a problem as I wanted to try out the new on premises vNext based Release Management features on 2015.2, but don’t want to place the RC on my production server (though there is go live support)....

Brian Harry has done a couple of very interesting posts (post 1 and post 2) on the recent outages of the VSTS service. Whether you use VSTS or not they make interesting reading for anyone who is involved in running SaaS based systems, or anything at scale. From the posts the obvious reading is you cannot under estimate the importance of in production montoring having an response plan doing a proper root cause analysis and putting steps in place to stop the problem happening again Well worth a read

This a a repost of a guest article first posted on the Microsoft UK Developers Blog: How to extend a VSTS release process to on-premises Note that since I write the original post there have been some changes on VSTS and the release to TFS 2015.2 RC1. These mean there is no longer an option to pull build artifacts from the an external TFS server as part of a release; so invalidating some of the options this post discusses....

Whilst seting up a Release Management 2015.1 server we came across a strange problem. The installation appears to go OK. We were able to install the server and from the client created a simple vNext release pipeline and run it. However, the release stalled on the ‘Upload Components’ step. Looking in event log of the VM running the Release Management server we could see many many errors all complaining about invalid XML, all in the general form...