There has for a long time been an issue that when you try to add a new activity to the toolbox when editing a TFS build workflow Visual Studio can crash. I have seen it many times and never got to the bottom of it. It seems to be machine specific, as one machine can work while another supposedly identical will fail, but I could never track down the issue. Today I was on a machine that was failing, but … ...
If you have a custom PowerShell script you wish to run you can create a tool in release Management (Inventory > Tools) for the script which deploys the .PS1, PSM files etc. and defines the command line to run it. The problem we hit was that our script failed, but did not fail the build step as the PowerShell.EXE running the script exited without error. The script had thrown an exception which was in the output log file, but it was marked as a completed step. ...
In a beautiful synchronicity the ALM Rangers DevOps guidance for PowerShell DSC has been release at at the same time as I am doing my DDDNorth session ‘What is Desired State Configuration and how does it help me?’ This Rangers project has been really interesting to work on, and provide much of the core of my session for DDDNorth. Well worth a look if you want to create your own DSC resources. ...
Whilst configuring a Release Management 2013.3 system I came across a confusing error. All seemed OK, the server, client and deployment agents were all installed and seemed to be working, but when I tried to select a build to deploy from both the Team Projects and Build drop downs were empty. A check of the Windows event log on the server showed the errors The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send The handshake failed due to an unexpected packet format ...
If you want to get your TFS build process to product SSRS RDL files you need to call the vsDevEnv custom activity to run Visual Studio (just like for SSIS packages). On our new TFS2013.3 based build agents this step started to fail, turns out the issue was not incorrect versions of DLLs or a some badly applied update, but that the license for Visual Studio on the build agent had expire. ...
I have trying to update a Azure hosted SQL DB using Release Management and the SSDT SQLPackage tools. All worked fine on my test Azure instance, but then I wanted to deploy to production I got the following error \*\*\* An error occurred during deployment plan generation. Deployment cannot continue. Failed to import target model \[dbname\]. Detailed message Unable to reconnect to database: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Unable to reconnect to database: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The wait operation timed out Turns out SQLPackage.exe was connecting OK, as if I entered an invalid password it gave a different error, so it had made the connection and then died. ...
Black Marble is hosting a free Microsoft ALM event at our offices on the 26th of November. For once I will not be speaker, Giles and Colin from the Microsoft UK Visual Studio Team are coming up to deliver the session. For more details and registration see http://bit.ly/ALMLeeds
I have been playing around with the idea of using a DD-WRT-V router on a Hyper-V VM to connect my local virtual machines to the Internet as discussed by Martin Hinshlewood in his blog post. I learned a few things that might be of use to others trying the same setup. What I used to do Prior to using the router I had been using three virtual switches on my Windows 8 Hyper-V setup with multiple network adaptors to connect both my VMs and host machine to the switches and networks ...
We have for a long time used the TFSVersion custom build activity to stamp all our TFS builds with a unique version number that matches out build number. However, this only edits the AssemblyInfo.cs file. As we are now building more and more Windows 8 Store Apps we also need to edit the XML in the Package.appxmanifest files used to build the packages too. Just like a Wix MSI project it is a good idea the package version matches some aspect of the assemblies it contains. We need to automate the update of this manifest as people too often forget to increment the version, causing confusion all down the line. ...
Last night I upgraded this blog server to BlogEngine.NET 3.1. I used the new built in automated update tool, in an offline backup copy of course. It did most of the job without any issues. The only extra things I needed to do was Removed a <add name=“XmlRoleProvider” …> entry in the web.config. I have had to do this before on every install. Run the SortOrderUpdate.sql script to add the missing column and index (see issue 12543) Once done and tested locally I upload the tested site to my production server. Just a point to note, that the upgrade creates some backup ZIPs of your site before the upgrade, you don’t need to copy these around as they are large. ...