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Do you find your TFS server gets forgotten? It is not owned by the IT department and the Development team don’t have the time to support it fully, it never gets patched or upgrades? Or maybe you are adopting a cloud first strategy for all you systems? Well maybe it is time to consider moving your on-premises TFS instance to VSTS? On the 9th of May at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Leeds I will be presenting at a Black Marble /Microsoft event where we will be looking at Microsoft’s new high fidelity VSTS database import tools that can be used to move a TFS instance to VSTS....

Rik and myself had a great time fun last night chatting all things ALM and DevOps with Greg Duncan on RadioTFS show 136. I was amazed it was a year since I was last on. The Podcast is now up at http://radiotfs.com/Show/136 , why not have a listen

My Generate Release Notes VSTS extension has been my most popular by a long way. I have enhanced it, with the help of others via pull requests, but there have been two repeating common questions that have not been resolved Is it cross platform? Why does it show different work items and commit associations to the VSTS Release Status UI? Well the answer to the first is that the core of the logic for the extension came from a PowerShell script we used internally, so PowerShell was the obvious first platform, especially as though my PowerShell skills are not great, my Node was weaker!...

I have been working on a new Node.JS based VSTS Build Extension, so loads of Node learning going on as it is a language I have not done much with in the past. I expect to get caught out in places, but I have just wasted a good few hours on this one! I am working in VS Code using Typescript to generate my Node based task. Whilst hacking around I have been just running the script in the VS Code debugger, getting the logic right before packaging it up and testing within a VSTS Build extension....

It has just been announced by Microsoft that it’s Open Source service CodePlex is shutting down before the end of the year. The reality is that the Microsoft focused Open Source community, and Microsoft itself, have moved to GitHub a good while ago. I think I, like most developers, have moved any active Open Source projects to GitHub a good while ago, but I still had legacy ones on CodePlex....

I m really pleased to say that we at Black Marble are hosting a Yorkshire venue for the upcoming Global DevOps Bootcamp, to quote the main bootcamp site… “Global DevOps Bootcamp is a global event that will be held on Saturday June 17th and is all about DevOps on the Microsoft Stack. Centrally organized by Xpirit and Solidify and offered to you by Black Marble. During this 1-day event we will join (Microsoft) DevOps communities all around the world to talk, learn and play with DevOps concepts....

I am speaking “Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform” a Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event at Microsoft’s offices in Dublin on the 30th of this month. A bit of a departure for me I will be speaking on Xamarin, makes a change To register see the event site

Pleased to say I’m presenting on DevOps with VSTS at the SharePoint UG in Leeds on the 7th of March To register have a look at the Usergroup’s events site

You never know how people will use a tool once it is out ‘in the wild’. I wrote my Generate Release Notes VSTS extension to generate markdown files, but people have attempted to use it in other ways. I realised, via an issue raised on Github, that it can also be used, without any code changes, to generate other formats such as HTML. The only change required is to provide an HTML based template as opposed to markdown one....

I have posted on previously how we used TFS Lab Management to provision our test and development environments. With our move to VSTS, where Lab Management does not exist, we needed to look again at how to provision these labs. There are a few options… Move to the Cloud – aka stop using Lab Management Arguably the best option is to move all your lab VMs up to the cloud. Microsoft even has the specific service to help with this Azure DevTest Labs....