Posts

We have recently swapped the Word template we use to make sure all our proposals and other documents are consistent. The changes are all cosmetic, fonts, footers etc. to match our new website; it still makes use of the same VSTO automation to do much of the work. The problem was I needed to swap the .DOTX file within the VSTO Word Add-in project, we had not been editing the old DOTX template in the project, but had created a new one based on a copy outside of Visual Studio. ...

Whilst developing our new set of websites we have been using MSDeploy to package up the websites for deployment to test and production Azure accounts. These deployments were being triggered directly using Visual Studio. Now we know this is not best practice, you don’t want developers shipping to production from their development PCs, so I have been getting around to migrating these projects to Release Management. I wanted to minimise change, as we like MSDeploy, I just wanted to pass the extra parameters to allow a remote deployment as opposed to a local one using the built in WebDeploy component in Release Management ...

I am speaking at PreEmptive’s event on Application Analytics in at Microsoft’s office in London on the 30th of September. There are various speakers from PreEmptive, Microsoft and Black Marble at this free event. There are still spaces available, just follow the link: Application Analytics with Visual Studio and PreEmptive Analytics for more details and registration.

Whilst developing a new Release Management pipeline I did hit a problem that a component that published MSDeploy packages to Azure started to fail. It had been working then suddenly I started seeing ‘communication with the deployer was lost during deployment’ messages as shown below. No errors were shown in any logs I could find, and no files appeared on the deployment target (you would expect the files/scripts to be deployed to appear on the machine running a RM Deployment client in the C:users[account]localtempRM folder structure). ...

As part of our IT refresh we have decided to move this BlogEngine.NET server from a Hyper-V VM in our office to an Azure website. BlogEngine.NET is now a gallery item for Azure website, so a few clicks and your should be up and running. However, if you want to use SQL as opposed to XML as the datastore you need to do a bit more work. This process is well documented in the video ‘Set BlogEngine.NET to use SQL provider in Azure’, but we found we needed to perform some extra steps due to where our DB was coming from. ...

Using the process in my previous post you can get a TFS build to create the .CSCFG and .CSPKG files needed to publish a Cloud Service. However, you hit a problem if your solution contains more that one Cloud Service project; as opposed to a single cloud service project with multiple roles, which is not a problem. The method outlined in the previous post drops the two files into a Packages folder under the drops location. The .CSPKG files are fine, as they have unique names. However there is only one ServiceConfiguration.cscfg, whichever one was created last. ...

I have been sorting out some builds for use with Release Management that include Azure Cloud Solutions. To get the correct packages built by TFS I have followed the process in my past blog post. The problem was I kept getting the build error The target "Azure PackagesBlackMarble.Win8AppBuilder.AzureApi" does not exist in the project. The issue was I could not get the solution folder/project name right for the MSBUILD target parameter. Was it the spaces in the folder? I just did not know. ...

 recently needed to deploy a Windows service as part of a Release Management pipeline. In the past, our internal systems I have only need to deploy DB (via SSDT Dacpacs) and Websites (via MSDeploy), so a new experience. WIX Contents The first step to to create an MSI installer for the service. This was done using WIX, with all the fun that usually entails. The key part was a component to do the actual registration and starting of the service ...

I find I am spending more time with PowerShell these days, as we aim to automated more of our releases and specifically with DSC in PowerShell 4, as I am sure many of us are Give that fact, the PowerShell Summit Europe 2014 at the end of the month looks interesting. I only found out about it too late and I have diary clashes but might be of interest to some of you. Looks like a really good hands event. ...

I had been suffering with the 0x80188308 error when I tried to update my Nokia 820 to the WP81 Update 1 because I had the developer preview installed. I had been putting off what appeared to be the only solution of doing a reset as discussed in the forums as it seem a bit drastic, thought I would wait for Microsoft to sort out the process. I got bored waiting.. Turns out as long as you do the backup first it is fairly painless, took about an hour of uploads and downloads over WiFi ...