Posts

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each has a pair of mirrored disks for the OS and RAID5 group of disks for data. We use SQL 2012 Enterprise Always On for replication to keep the DBs in sync. The servers are part of a Windows cluster (needed for Always On) and we use a VM to give a third server in the witness role. This is hosted on a production Hyper-V cloud. We have a number of availability groups on this platform, basically one per service we run. This allows us to split the read/write load between the two servers (unless they have failed over to a single box). If we had only one availability group for all the DBs one node would being all the read/write and the other read only, so not that balanced. ...

If you use TFS then it is well worth a look at Brian Harry’s Teched2014 session ‘Modern Application Lifecycle Management’. It goes through changes and new features with TFS both on-premise and in the cloud, including Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub Authentication with your corporate Active Directory account via AAD (planned for Summer 2014) New API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks Release Management, PowerShell DSC, ability to link Azure VMs including client OS for dev/test Application Insights available inside Visual Studio Azure vNext portal – bring it all together Not all these features are in 2013.2 (which was released during the conference). However, in the session they said Visual Studio 2013.3CTP is going to be available next week, so not long to wait if you want a look at the latest features. ...

A very common question I am asked at clients is “Is it possible for a parent TFS work item to be automatically be set to ‘done’ when all the child work items are ‘done’?”. The answer is not out the box, there is no work item state roll up in TFS. However it is possible via the API. I have modified my TFS Alerts DSL CodePlex project to expose this functionality. I have added a couple of methods that allow you to find the parent and child of a work item, and hence create your own rollup script. ...

Whilst running tests as part of a Release Management deployment I started seeing the error ‘The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required’, and hence all my tests failed. It seems that there are issues that can cause this problem, as mentioned in the comments in Martin Hinshelwood’s post on running tests in deployment, specially spaces in the build name can cause this problem, but this was not the case for me. ...

If you are using Webdeploy you might wish to alter the connection string the for the LocalSQLServer that is used by the ASP.NET provider for web part personalisation. The default is to use ASPNETDB.mdf in the APP_Data folder, but in a production system you could well want to use a ‘real’ SQL server. If you look in your web config, assuming you are not using the default ‘not set’ setting, will look something like ...

Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post ‘WebDeploy and Release Management – The Proper Way’ explains how to pass parameters from Release Management into MSDeploy to update Web.config files. On the system I am working on I also need to do some further web.config translation, basically the WCF section is different on a Lab or Production build as it needs to use Kerberos, whereas local debug builds don’t. In the past I dealt with this, and editing the AppSettings, using MSDeploy web.config translation. This worked fine, but it meant I built the product three time, exactly what Colin’s post is trying to avoid. The techniques in the post for the AppSettings and connection strings are fine, but don’t apply so well for the large block swapouts, as I need for WCF bindings section. ...

I have been using Release Management to update some of our internal deployment processes. This has included changing the way we roll out MSDeploy packages; I am following Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post of the subject. I hit an interesting issue today. One of the configuration variable parameters I was passing into a component was a password field. For my initial tests had just let this be a clear text ‘standard’ string in the Release Management. Once I got this all working I thought I better switch this variable to ‘encrypted’, so I just change the type on the Configuration Variables tab. ...

I have been running Windows Phone 8.1 Update for a couple of weeks now and have to say I like. I have not suffered the poor battery life others seem to have suffered. Maybe this is an feature of the Nokia 820 no needing as many firmware updates from Nokia (which aren’t available yet) note having such power hungry features as the larger phones. The only issue I have had is that I lost an audio channel when using a headset. Initially I was unsure if it was a mechanical fault on the headphone socket, but I checked the headset was good, it sounded as if the balance was faded to just one side as you could just hear something faint on the failing side. Anyway as often is the case in IT, a reboot of the phone fixed the issue. ...

A significant blocker for some of my customers moving to Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012 previously) has been the removal of Visual Studio Setup Projects; my experience has been confirmed by UserVoice. Well Microsoft have addressed this pain point by releasing a Visual Studio Extension to re-add this Visual Studio 2010 functionality to 2013. This can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery. Given this release, the question now becomes should you use it? Or should you take the harder road in the short term of moving to Wix, but with the far greater flexibility this route offers going forward? ...

My Nokia 820 phone is now updated to 8.1 with the developer preview. The actual upgrade was straight forward, the only issue was that the Store was down last night so updating apps could not be done until this morning. This was made more of an issue by the fact I had had to remove all my Nokia Maps and the iPodcast application (and downloaded podcasts) to free up space on the phone to allow the upgrade. Both these apps could only store data on the phone (not the SDcard) thus blocked the upgrade. This lack of space on the actual phone has been a constant issue for me on the Nokia 820. ...