Updated 22 Mar 2016 This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace) Typemock Isolator provides a way to ‘mock the un-mockable’, such as sealed private classes in .NET, so can be a invaluable tool in unit testing. To allow this mocking Isolator interception has to be started before any unit tests are run and stopped when completed. For a developer this is done automatically within the Visual Studio IDE, but on build systems you have to run something to do this as part of your build process....

Voting for DDD North Sessions is now open - http://bit.ly/DDDNorth15Sessions Vote on what you would like to see at this community conference

I have been trying to parameterise the SQL DB connection string used by nLog when it is defined in a web.config file of a web site being deployed via Release Management and WebDeploy i.e. I wanted to select and edit the bit highlighted of my web.config file <configuration> <nlog xmlns="[http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd"](http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd") xmlns:xsi="[http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"](http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance")\> <targets async="true"> <target xsi:type="Database" name="SQL" dbProvider="System.Data.SqlClient" connectionString="Data Source=myserver;Database=mydb;Persist Security Info=True;Pooling=False" keepConnection="true" commandText="INSERT INTO \[Logs\](ID, TimeStamp, Message, Level, Logger, Details, Application, MachineName, Username) VALUES(newid(), getdate(), @message, @level, @logger, @exception, @application, @machineName, @username)"> <parameter layout="${message}" name="@message"></parameter> ……....

TFS vNext builds do not have a concept of build quality unlike the old XAML based builds. This is an issue for us as we used the changing of the build quality as signal to test a build, or to mark it as released to a client (this was all managed with my TFS Alerts DSL to make sure suitable emails and build retention were used). So how to get around this problem with vNext?...

I like web deploy as a means to package up websites for deployment. I like the way I only need to add /p:DeployOnBuild=True;PublishProfile=Release as an MSBuild argument to get the package produced as part of an automated build. This opening up loads of deployment options I recently hit an issue packaging up a solution that contained an Azure WebSite and an Azure Web Job (to be hosted in the web site)....