But it works on my PC!

Finding it hard to make use of Azure for DevTest?

Announced at Connect() today were a couple of new tools that could really help a team with their DevOps issues when working with VSTS and Azure (and potentially other scenarios too). DevTest Lab is a new set of tooling within the Azure portal that allows the easy management of Test VMs, their creation and management as well as providing a means to control how many VMs team members can create, thus controlling cost....

Chrome extension to help with exploratory testing

One of the many interesting announcements at Connect() today was that the new Microsoft Chrome Extension for Exploratory Testing is available in the Chrome Store This is a great tool if you use VSO, sorry VSTS, allowing an easy way to ‘kick the tyres’ on your application, logging any bugs directly back to VSTS as Bug work items. Best of all, it makes it easy to test your application on other platforms with the link to Perfecto Mobile....

Hello to Visual Studio Team Services

After Microsoft’s announcements at todays Connect() event, Visual Studio Online (VSO) is now Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It is a good job I never changed the tag on this blog from VSTS when Microsoft dropped the Team System name a few years ago. For a run down of all the VSTS announcements have a look at Brian Harry’s blog

Why you need to use vNext build tasks to share scripts between builds

Whilst doing a vNext build from a TFVC repository I needed map both my production code branch and a common folder of scripts that I intended to use in a number of builds, so my build workspace was set to Map – $/BM/mycode/main - my production code Map – $/BM/BuildDefinations/vNextScripts - my shared PowerShell I wish to run in different builds e.g. assembly versioning. As I wanted this to be a CI build, I also set the trigger to $/tp1/mycode/main...

Versioning a VSIX package as part of the TFS vNext build (when the source is on GitHub)

I have recently added a CI build to my GitHub stored ParametersXmlAddin VSIX project. I did this using Visual Studio Online’s hosted build service, did you know that this could used to build source from GitHub? As part of this build I wanted to version stamp the assemblies and the resultant VSIX package. To do the former I used the script documented on MSDN, for the latter I also used the same basic method of extracting the version from the build number as used in the script for versioning assemblies....