Posts

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of the DSC module the error was “cannot be loaded because you opted not to run this software now”. The other project just suffered mixed .NET assembly loading errors. ...

If you are trying to use Release Management or any deployment tool with a network isolated Lab Management setup you will have authentication issues. Your isolated domain is not part of your production domain, so you have to provide credentials. In the past this meant Shadow Accounts or the simple expedient of running a NET USE at the start of your deployment script to provide a login to the drops location. In Release Management 2013.4 we get a new option to address this issue if you are using DSC based deployment. This is Deploy from a build drop using a shared UNC path. In this model the Release Management server copies the contents of the drops folder to a known share and passes credentials to access it down to the DSC client (you set these as parameters on the server). ...

The DCS two step When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management is involved. Colin Dembovsky did an excellent pair of posts on getting Release Management working with DSC based vNext templates. The core of the first post is that he made use of the Script DSC resource to run SQLPackage.EXE and MSDeploy to do the actual deployment of a system as well as using it to manage the transformation of the configuration files in his MSDeploy package. ...

Whilst helping a Java based team (part of larger organisation that used many sets of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools) to migrate from Subversion to TFS I had to tackle their Jenkins/Ant based builds. They could have stayed on Jenkins and switched to the TFS source provider, but they wanted to at least look at how TFS build would better allow them to trace their builds against TFS work items. All went well, we setup a build controller and agent specifically for their team and installed Java onto it as well the TFS build extensions. We were very quickly able to get our test Java project building on the new build system. ...

As with many concepts it is not the the idea that is hard but it’s application. ‘Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories’ by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides some great tips to apply the concept of user stories to real world problems. Highlighting where they work and where they don’t, and what you can do about it. I think this book is well worth a read for anyone, irrespective of their role in a team; it’s short chapters (usually a couple of pages per idea) means it easy to pickup and put down when you get a few minutes. Perfect for that commute ...

Whilst building a new TFS build agent VM using our standard scripts I hit a problem that SSDT projects would not build, but was fine on our existing agents. The error was C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftVisualStudiov12.0SSDTMicrosoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SqlTasks.targets (513): The “SqlBuildTask” task failed unexpectedly. System.MethodAccessException: Attempt by method ‘Microsoft.Data.Tools.Schema.Sql.Build.SqlTaskHost.OnCreateCustomSchemaData(System.String, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2<System.String,System.String>)’ to access method ‘Microsoft.Data.Tools.Components.Diagnostics.SqlTracer.ShouldTrace(System.Diagnostics.TraceEventType)’ failed. The problem was fixed by doing an update via the Visual Studio > Tools > Extensions and Updates. Once this was completed the build was fine. ...

I posted a month or so ago about my ‘Experiences using a DD-WRT router with Hyper-V’, well I have been living with it over a month? How has it been going? Like the curate’s egg ‘good in parts’. It seems OK for while and then everything would get a bit slow to stop. Just as a reminder this is what I had ended up with In essence, a pair of virtual switches, one internal using DHCP on the DD-WRT virtual router, and a second one connected to an active external network (usually Ethernet, as DHCP with virtual switches and WIFI in Hyper-V seem a very hit and miss affair). ...

We use O365 to provide Lync messaging. So when I rebuilt my PC I thought I needed to re-install the client; so I logged into the O365 web site and selected the install option. Turns out this was a mistake. I had Office 2013 installed, so I already had the client, I just had not noticed. If you do install O365 Lync client (as well as Office 2013 one) you get file access errors reported with your outlook.ost files. If this occurs, just un-install the O376 client and use the one in Office 2013, the errors go away ...

There have been a load on announcements about TFS, VSO and Visual Studio in general in the past couple of week, mostly at the Connect() event. Just to touch on a few items Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4. The first public preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 The .NET Framework is going open source and cross platform Visual Studio Community 2013 – a new edition of Visual Studio that combines everything in all the Express products and adds extensibility support. Learn more… New improvements to Visual Studio Online Release Management as service on VSO If you have not had a chance to have look at these features try the videos of all the sessions on Channel9, the keynotes are a good place to start. Also look, as usual, at the various posts on Brian Harry’s Blog. It is time of rapid change in ALM tooling ...

Whilst getting integration tests running as part of a Release Management pipeline within Lab Management I hit a problem that TCM triggered tests failed as the tool claimed it could not access the TFS build drops location, and that no .TRX (test results) were being produced. This was strange as it used to work (the RM system had worked when it was 2013.2, seems to have started to be issue with 2013.3 and 2013.4, but this might be a coincidence) ...