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**Updated 22 Mar 2016 **This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace If you are using Pester to unit test your PowerShell code then there is a good chance you will want to include it in your automated build process. To do this, you need to get Pester installed on your build machine. The usual options would be Manual install from GitHub Install via Chocolaty Install via Nuget If you own the build agent VM then any of these options are good, you can even write the NuGet restore into your build process itself. However there is a problem, both the first two options need administrative access as they put the Pester module in the $PSModules folder (under ‘Program Files’); so these can’t be used on VSTS’s hosted build system, where your are not an administrator So this means you are left with copying the module (and associated functions folder) to some local working folder and running it manually; but do you really want to have to store the Pester module in your source repo? My solution was to write a vNext build tasks to deploy the Pester files and run the Pester tests. The task takes two parameters ...

With the advent of TFS 2015.2 RC (and the associated VSTS release) we have seen the short term removal of the ‘External TFS Build’ option for the Release Management artifacts source. This causes me a bit of a problem as I wanted to try out the new on premises vNext based Release Management features on 2015.2, but don’t want to place the RC on my production server (though there is go live support). Also the ability to get artifacts from an on premises TFS instance when using VSTS open up a number of scenarios, something I know some of my clients had been investigating. ...

Brian Harry has done a couple of very interesting posts (post 1 and post 2) on the recent outages of the VSTS service. Whether you use VSTS or not they make interesting reading for anyone who is involved in running SaaS based systems, or anything at scale. From the posts the obvious reading is you cannot under estimate the importance of in production montoring having an response plan doing a proper root cause analysis and putting steps in place to stop the problem happening again Well worth a read ...

This a a repost of a guest article first posted on the Microsoft UK Developers Blog: How to extend a VSTS release process to on-premises Note that since I write the original post there have been some changes on VSTS and the release to TFS 2015.2 RC1. These mean there is no longer an option to pull build artifacts from the an external TFS server as part of a release; so invalidating some of the options this post discusses. I have struck out the outdated sections. The rest of the post is still valid, especially the section on where to update configuration settings. The release of TFS 2015.2 RC1 actually makes many of options easier as you don’t have to bridge between on premises TFS and VSTS as both build and release features are on the same server. ...

Whilst seting up a Release Management 2015.1 server we came across a strange problem. The installation appears to go OK. We were able to install the server and from the client created a simple vNext release pipeline and run it. However, the release stalled on the ‘Upload Components’ step. Looking in event log of the VM running the Release Management server we could see many many errors all complaining about invalid XML, all in the general form ...

You can use the filePath type in a vNext VSTS/TFS task as shown below { "name": "settingsFile", "type": "filePath", "label": "Settings File", "defaultValue": "", "required": false, "helpMarkDown": "Path to single settings files to use (as opposed to files in project folders)", "groupName":"advanced" } to present a file picker dialog in the build editor that allows the build editor to pick a file or folder in the build’s source repository While doing some task development recently I found that this control did not behave as I had expected ...

Updated 22 Mar 2016 This tasks is available in the VSTS Marketplace I have previously posted on how a PowerShell script can be used to run StyleCop as part of vNext VSTS/TFS build. Now I have more experience with vNext tasks it seemed a good time to convert this PowerShell script into a true task that can deploy StyleCop and making it far easier to expose the various parameters StyleCop allows. To this end I have written a new StyleCop task that can be found in my vNext Build Repo, this has been built to use the 4.7.49.0 release of StyleCop (so you don’t need to install StyleCop in the build machine, so it works well on VSTS). To use this task: ...

Update 6 Feb 2016 - I have made some major changes to this task to expose more parameters, have a look at this post that details the newer version Today a good way to pull together all your measures of code quality is to run SonarQube within your automated build; in a .NET world this can show changes in quality over time for tools such as FxCop (Code Analysis) and StyleCop. However sometime you might just want to run one of these tools alone as part of your automated build. For Code Analysis this is easy, it is built into Visual Studio just set it as a property on the project. For StyleCop it is a bit more awkward as StyleCop was not designed to be run from the command line. ...

There have been some requests for more information about the areas I convered in my presentation at the Black Marble Tech Update 2016 that we held last week. I could send out slides, but I think it is far more useful to point you at the ‘live’ resource on the Internet. The key reason for this is that the whole of the Visual Studio family is now being released at a ‘cloud cadence’ i.e. new features are appearing rapidly, so anything I write will soon be out of date. Better to look at the live sources where possible. ...

As I discovered during my BlogEngine upgrade, there is an effort within the project team to focus the codebase on three possible usage models on any given BlogEngine server instance: Single blog with a user – a personal blog (default) Single blog with many users – a team/company blog Many blogs each with a single user – a set of related blogs that can be agregated togther I needed the third option, problem was in its history our blog has been both of the other two types, so I have multiple user accounts for each blogs, and login usernames are repeated between individual blogs on the server. ...