Using Release Management vNext templates when you don’t want to use DSC scripts – A better script

A couple of months ago I wrote a post on using PowerShell scripts to deploy web sites in Release Management vNext templates as opposed to DSC. In that post I provided a script to help with the translation of Release Management configuration variables to entries in the [MSDELPOY].setparameters.xml file for web sites. The code I provided in that post required you to hard code the variables to translate. This quickly become a problem for maintenance....

August 21, 2015 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Guest post at Microsoft - nUnit and Jasmine.JS unit tests in TFS/VSO vNext build

I have just had a guest post published on the Microsoft UK developers site nUnit and Jasmine.JS unit tests in TFS/VSO vNext build

August 19, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDDNorth 2015 submissions are open

DDDNorth is on again this year, back in it’s more northern base of the Sunderland University on the 24th of October You can submit your session proposal in here

August 19, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TF30063 Errors accessing a TFS 2015 server via the C# API after upgrade from 2013

Background We upgraded our production TFS 2013.4 server to TFS 2015 RTM this week. As opposed to an in-place upgrade we chose to make a few change on the way; so whilst leaving our DBs on our SQL 2012 cluster We moved to a new VM for our AT (to upgrade from Windows 2008R2 to 2012R2) Split the SSRS instance off the AT to a separate VM with a new SSAS server (again to move to 2012R2 and to ease management, getting all the reporting bits in one place) But we do not touch...

August 13, 2015 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Running Microsoft Test Manager Test Suites as part of a vNext Release pipeline - Part 2

In my last post I discussed how you could wire TCM tests into a Release Management vNext pipeline. The problem with the script I provided, as I noted, was that the deployment was triggered synchronously by the build i.e. the build/release process was: TFS Build Gets the source Compiled the code Run the unit tests Trigger the RM pipeline Wait while the RM pipeline completed RM then Deploys the code Runs the integration tests When RM completed the TFS build completes This process raised a couple of problems...

August 11, 2015 · 5 min · Richard Fennell