Release Management

Whilst listening to a recent Radio TFS it was mentioned that TFS Aggregator uses the C# SOAP based Azure DevOps APIs; hence needed a major re-write as these APIs are being deprecated. Did you know that there was a REST API alternative to TFS Aggregator? My Azure DevOps Services & Server Alerts DSL is out there, and has been for a while, but I don’t think used by many people. It aims to do the same as TFS Aggregator, but is based around Python scripting....

Today I have released a major new release, V2, of my VSTS Cross Platform Extension to build release notes. This new version is all down to the efforts of Greg Pakes who has completely re-written the task to use newer VSTS APIs. A minor issue is that this re-write has introduced a couple of breaking changes, as detailed below and on the project wiki oAuth script access has to be enabled on the agent running the task There are minor changes in the template format, but for the good, as it means both TFVC and GIT based releases now use a common template format....

My existing VSTS CI/CD process has a problem that the deployment of a VSTS extension, from the moment it is uploaded to when it’s tasks are available to a build agent, is not instantiation. The process can potentially take a few minutes to roll out. The problem this delay causes is a perfect candidate for using VSTS Release Gates; using the gate to make sure the expected version of a task is available to an agent before running the next stage of the CD pipeline e....

I recently released an updated version of my Generate Parameters.XML tool for Visual Studio. This release adds support for generating parameters.xml files from app.config files as well as web.config files Why you might ask why add support for app.config files when the parameters.xml model is only part of WebDeploy? Well, at Black Marble we like the model of updating a single file using a tokenised set of parameters from within our DevOps CI/CD pipelines....

As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful running of a given build. So if the last release of the task extension was successful then the next set of tests have no associations to go in the release notes, not exactly exercising all the code paths!...

Background I have recently been posting on using Azure to host private VSTS build/release agents to avoid agent queue deadlocking issues with more complex release pipelines. One of the areas discussed is reducing cost of running a private agent in Azure by only running the private agent within a limited time range, when you guess it might be needed. I have done this using DevTest Labs Auto Start and Auto Stop features....

Updates 28th Nov 2017: Also see this second post Creating a VSTS build agent on an Azure DevLabs Windows Server VM with no GUI - Using Artifacts 30th Nov 2017: Also see associated post Announcing a new VSTS Extension for Starting and Stopping Azure DevTest Labs VMs As I posted recently I have been trying to add more functional tests to the VSTS based release CI/CD pipeline for my VSTS Extensions, and as I noted depending on how you want to run your tests e....

As time passes I have found there is a need for more cross platform VSTS extensions as there is more uptake of VSTS beyond it’s historic Microsoft platform based roots. Historically most of my extensions have been Powershell based. Now this is not a fundamental problem for cross platform usage. this is due to the availability of Powershell Core. However, Typescript and Node.JS is a better fit I think in many cases....

Updated: 5th Aug 2016 added notes in PublisherID I have been developing a few VSTS/TFS build related extensions and have published a few in the VSTS marketplace. This has all been a somewhat manual process, a mixture of Gulp and PowerShell has helped a bit, but I decided it was time to try to do a more formal approach. To do this I have used Jesse Houwing’s VSTS Extension Tasks. Even with this set of tasks I am not sure what I have is ‘best practice’, but it does work....