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I have just released a major update to my Generate Release Notes VSTS Build extension. This V2 update adds support to look back into past releases to find when there was a successful release to a given stage/environment and creates a rollup set of build artifacts, and hence commits/changesets and workitems, in the release notes. This has been a long running request on GitHub for this extension which I am pleased to have been able to address. ...

Over the Christmas break I migrated our on premises TFS 2015 instance to VSTS. The reason for the migration was multi-fold: We were blocked on moving to TFS 2017 as we could not easily upgrade our SQL cluster to SQL 2014 We wanted to be on the latest, greatest and newest features of VSTS/TFS We wanted to get away from having to perform on-premises updates every few months To do the migration we used the public preview of the TFS to VSTS Migrator. ...

Introduction A while ago I create the TFSAlertsDSL project to provide a means to script responses to TFS Alert SOAP messages using Python. The SOAP Alert technology has been overtaken by time with the move to Service Hooks. So I have taken the time to move this project over to the newer technology, which is supported both on TFS 2015 (onwards) and VSTS. I also took the chance to move from CodePlex to GitHub and renamed the project to VSTSServiceHookDsl. ...

If you are moving from on-premises TFS to VSTS you might hit the same problem I have just have. The structure of a VSTS releases is changing, there is now the concept of multiple ‘Deployment Steps’ in an environment. This means you can use a number of different agents for a single environment – a good thing. The downside this that if you export a TFS2015.3 release process and try to import it to VSTS it will fail saying the JSON format is incorrect. ...

Whilst working with the VSTS Data Import Service I ended up migrating a TFS TPC up to VSTS that had an old XAML Build Controller defined. I did not need this XAML build controller, in fact I needed to remove it because it was using my free private build controller slot. Problem was I could not find a way to remove it via the VSTS (or Visual Studio Team Explorer) UI, and the VM that had been running the build controller was long gone. ...

Background I recently decided to change one of my VSTS instance to be directory backed. What this means is that in the past users logged in using LiveIDs (MSAs by their new name); once the VSTS instance was linked to an Azure Active Directory (AAD), via the Azure portal, they could login only if they were using an account in the AAD their MSA was listed as a guest in the AAD they used a work ID in another AAD that is listed as a guest in my AAD Thus giving me centralised user management. ...

Azure DevTest Labs has been available for a while and I have found it a good way to make sure I control costs of VMs i.e. making sure they are shutdown outside office hours. However, in the past, have had a major limitation for me that they only allowed templates that contained a single VM. You could group these together but it was bit awkward. Well at Connect() it was announced that there is now complex ARM template support. So you can now build multi-VM environment that simulate the environments you need to work on as a single unit. ...

One type of feature I hate people demoing in any IDE, especially Visual Studio, is the ‘just click here to publish to live from the developers PC’. This is just not good practice, we want to encourage a good DevOps process with Source Control Automated build Automated release with approvals The problem is, this can all be a bit much for people, it takes work and knowledge, and that right click is just too tempting. ...

I am often asked asked ‘How can I move my TFS installation to VSTS?’ In the past the only real answer I had was the consultant’s answer ‘it depends’. There were options, but they all ended up losing fidelity i.e. that the history of past changes got removed or altered in some manner. For many companies the implication of such changes meant they stayed on-premises; with all the regular backups, updates and patch running the use of any on-premises service entails. ...

What are the changes in allowed email addresses in MSAs? You may or may not have noticed that there has been a recent change in LiveID (or Microsoft Account MSA as they are now called). In the past you could create a MSA using an existing email address e.g. richard@mydomain.co.uk . This is no longer an option. If you try to create a new MSA with a non Microsoft (outlook.com/hotmal.com) email they are blocked saying ‘This email is part of a reserved domain. Please enter a different email address’. ...