A workaround for the error ‘TF14061: The workspace ws_1_18;Project Collection Build Service does not exist’ when mapping a TFVC workspace

Whilst writing some training material for VSTS I hit a problem creating a TFVC workspace. I was using VS2017, linking a TFVC Repo to a local folder. I was connecting to the VSTS instance using an MSA. In Team Explorer, when I came to do a ‘Map & Get’ to map the source locations I got a ‘TF14061: The workspace ws_1_18;Project Collection Build Service does not exist’ error Strange error, which I could see no obvious reason for....

May 30, 2018 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Opps, I made that test VSTS extension public by mistake, what do I do now?

I recently, whilst changing a CI/CD release pipeline, updated what was previously a private version of a VSTS extension in the VSTS Marketplace with a version of the VSIX package set to be public. Note, in my CI/CD process I have a private and public version of each extension (set of tasks), the former is used for functional testing within the CD process, the latter is the one everyone can see....

April 14, 2018 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for 2755 and 1632 ‘The Temp folder is on a drive that is full or is inaccessible’ errors

Whilst trying to install an MSI package we kept getting the errors 2755 and 1632 ‘The Temp folder is on a drive that is full or is inaccessible’. After much fiddling we found the problem was that the %systemroot%installer folder was missing. Once this was manually re-added the MSIs installed without a problem. The actual TEMP folder setting was a red herring

March 21, 2018 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Using VSTS Gates to help improve my deployment pipeline of VSTS Extensions to the Visual Studio Marketplace

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....

March 20, 2018 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

Fixing a ‘git-lfs filter-process: gif-lfs: command not found’ error in Visual Studio 2017

I am currently looking at the best way to migrate a large legacy codebase from TFVC to Git. There are a number of ways I could do this, as I have posted about before. Obviously, I have ruled out anything that tries to migrate history as ‘that way hell lies’; if people need to see history they will be able to look at the archived TFVC instance. TFVC and Git are just too different in the way they work to make history migrations worth the effort in my opinion....

March 9, 2018 · 3 min · Richard Fennell