Posts

I have been preparing for my Techorama session on TFS vNext build. One of the demo’s I am planning is to use the Node based cross platform build agent to build something on a Linux VM. Turns out this takes a few undocumented steps to get this going with the CTP of TFS 2015 The process I followed was: I installed a Mint 17 VM On the VM, I installed the Node VSOAgent as detailed in the npm documentation (or I could have built it from from source from GitHub to get the bleeding edge version) I created a new agent instance...

Black Marble are hosting, at our offices, a Microsoft event on the 18th March on ALM with Visual Studio & TFS 2013. This is a repeat of the sell out event we hosted in the autumn. For details of the event and registration see the booking site

A couple of weeks ago I presented on DSC and Release Management as part of the Microsoft UK TechDays Online 2015 event. All the sessions from this three day event are now available on demand at TechDays Online 2015 on-demand sessions. You do seem to have to register/login to see the content, so I can’t deep link to my session, but browsing the catalogue is a good idea there are some great sessions

We use my TFS Alerts DSL to perform tasks when our TFS build complete, one of these is a job to increment the minor version number and reset the version start date (the value that generates third field – days since a point in time) if a build is set to the quality ‘release’ e.g. 1.2.99.[unique build id] where 99 is the days count since some past date could change to 1....

Speaker registration for DDD South West has opened, problem is the event is the same weekend as the Maker Faire in Newcastle, don’t think I can do both. Both are great options though, good to have choices

Seem Windows 10 will be an option on the new Raspberry PI 2, that provides some more nice IoT options. It will be interesting to see which tools Microsoft look to target onto this board, I guess remote development from a PC as per their Galileo board. But there might be enough power for a bit more, we shall see

I have been trying to export a SQL Azure DB as a .BACPAC using the command line “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server120DACbinSqlPackage.exe” /action:Export /sourceservername:myserver.database.windows.net /sourcedatabasename:websitecontentdb /sourceuser:sa@myserver /sourcepassword: /targetfile:db.bacpac The problem is the command times out after around an hour, at the ‘Extracting schema from database’ stage. I got exactly the same issue if I use PowerShell as discussed in Sandrino Di Mattia’s post. The issue is the Azure service tier level I am running the SQL DB on....

Whilst setting up a new agent based deployment pipeline in Release Management I decided I to reuse an existing component as it already had the correct package location set and correct transforms for the MSDeploy package. Basically this pipeline was a new copy of an existing website with different branding (css file etc.), but the same configuration options. I had just expected this work, but I kept getting ‘file not found’ errors when MSDeploy was run....

I recently hit a problem that on one of our TFS 2013 build agents we could not run Windows 8.1 unit tests. Now as we know the build agent needs some care and attention to build Windows 8.1 at all, but we had followed this process. However, we still saw the issue that the project compiled but the tests failed with the error ‘Unit tests for Windows Store apps cannot be run with Limited User Account disabled....

Updated 28 Feb 2015 – Added bit on static addresses When using a DD-WRT virtual router, I have realised it is worth setting static a MAC address in Hyper-V and DHCP lease on the router for any server VMs you want access to from your base system OS. In my case this is TFS demo VM a connect to all the time. If you don’t do this the address of the VM seems to vary more than you might expect....