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One announcement I missed at at Connect() last week was that of Visual Studio Dev Essentials. I only heard about this one whilst listening to RadioTFS’s news from Connect() programme. Visual Studio Dev Essentials is mostly a re-packing of all the tools that were already freely available from Microsoft e.g. Visual Studio Community Edition, Tem Foundation Server Express etc.; but there are some notable additions* (some coming soon) Pluralsight (6-month subscription)—limited time only Xamarin University mobile training— coming soon WintellectNOW (3-month subscription) Microsoft Virtual Academy HackHands Live Programming Help ($25 credit) Priority Forum Support Azure credit ($25/month for 12 months)—coming soon Visual Studio Team Services account with five users App Service free tier PowerBI free tier HockeyApp free tier Application Insights free tier *Check the Visual Studio Dev Essentials site for the detailed T&C...

SonarQube released version 5.2 a couple of weeks ago. This enabled some new features that really help if you are working with MSbuild or just on a Windows platform in general. These are detailed in the posts Support for Active Directory and Single Sign On (SSO) in the SonarQube LDAP Plugin Support for Team Foundation Server 2015 in SonarQube TFVC SCM Plugin The new ability to manage users with LDAP is good, but one of the most important for me is the way 5....

Announced at Connect() today were a couple of new tools that could really help a team with their DevOps issues when working with VSTS and Azure (and potentially other scenarios too). DevTest Lab is a new set of tooling within the Azure portal that allows the easy management of Test VMs, their creation and management as well as providing a means to control how many VMs team members can create, thus controlling cost....

One of the many interesting announcements at Connect() today was that the new Microsoft Chrome Extension for Exploratory Testing is available in the Chrome Store This is a great tool if you use VSO, sorry VSTS, allowing an easy way to ‘kick the tyres’ on your application, logging any bugs directly back to VSTS as Bug work items. Best of all, it makes it easy to test your application on other platforms with the link to Perfecto Mobile....

After Microsoft’s announcements at todays Connect() event, Visual Studio Online (VSO) is now Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It is a good job I never changed the tag on this blog from VSTS when Microsoft dropped the Team System name a few years ago. For a run down of all the VSTS announcements have a look at Brian Harry’s blog

Whilst doing a vNext build from a TFVC repository I needed map both my production code branch and a common folder of scripts that I intended to use in a number of builds, so my build workspace was set to Map – $/BM/mycode/main - my production code Map – $/BM/BuildDefinations/vNextScripts - my shared PowerShell I wish to run in different builds e.g. assembly versioning. As I wanted this to be a CI build, I also set the trigger to $/tp1/mycode/main...

I have recently added a CI build to my GitHub stored ParametersXmlAddin VSIX project. I did this using Visual Studio Online’s hosted build service, did you know that this could used to build source from GitHub? As part of this build I wanted to version stamp the assemblies and the resultant VSIX package. To do the former I used the script documented on MSDN, for the latter I also used the same basic method of extracting the version from the build number as used in the script for versioning assemblies....

When access VSO you have two authentication options; either a LiveID (or an MSA using it’s newest name) or a Work Account ID (a domain account). The latter is used to provide extra security, so a domain admin can easily control who has access to a whole set of systems. It does assume you have used Azure Active Directory (AAD) that is sync’d with your on premises AD, and that this AAD is used to back your VSO instance....

At my session at DDDNorth I mentioned that some of the settings you needed to configure in SonarQube 5.1, such as DB connection strings for SonarRunner, would not need to be made once 5.2 was release. Well it was released today. Most important changes for we are Server handles all DB connections LDAP support for user authentication Should make the install process easier

Thanks to everyone who came to my session at DDDNorth on SonarQube, hope you found it useful. The links to resources for my session are SonarQube documentation Microsoft Product Team posts on Technical Debt ALM Rangers Guide on SonarQube (source) ALM Rangers Guide on SonarQube (explanatory post) SonarLint And you can find my slides on my GitHub repo https://github.com/rfennell/Presentations