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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’. ...

Whilst I have been on holiday my PC has been switched off and in a laptop bag. This did not seem to stopped me getting problems when I tried to use it again… Outlook could not sync to O365 – turns out there had been some changes in our hybrid Exchange infrastructure, I just need to restart/patch the PC on our company LAN to pick up all the new group policy settings etc. Could not login to OneDrive getting a script error https://auth.gfx.ms/16.000.26657.00/DefaultLogin_Core.js ...

I have been on holiday in Nepal for a couple of weeks; trekking to Annapurna Base Camp Whilst I was ‘off the grid’ a video I made on using the tools within VSTS to build a DevOps pipeline got published on Channel9 Hope you find it useful Note to myself: In the future I must make sure I have my eyes open for the landing screen. - Now fixed thanks to the CH9 curators ...

Great day at DDDNorth yesterday, hope everyone enjoyed it. Thanks to all the team who helped during the preparation and on the day. The slides from Rik Hepworth and my presentation on ‘_Living the dream - Real world DevOps with Azure and VSTS’ are up at Github. _ We were a late stand in session to cover for a presenter who could not attend on the day. So I hope it was not too much of let down, that we were not the speaker on the agenda, covered a different subject and did not match the title the spell checker converted out session title too. Though ‘Devils with Arms and Cats’ is maybe a good term for DevOps? ...

The video of my session at TechDays online is now available on Channel9, along with all the TechDay Online UK content Enjoy…

Updated 27 Sep 2016: Added solutions to known issues Background As I have posted many times we make use of TFS Lab Management to provide network isolated dev/test environments. Going forward I see us moving to Azure Dev Labs and/or Azure Stack with ARM templates, but that isn’t going to help me today, especially when I have already made the investment in setting up a Lab Management environments and they are ready to use. ...