Uncategorised

I recently posted on my development process for VSTS Extensions, it has been specifically PowerShell based build ones I have been working on. During this development I have come across a few more gotcha’s that I think are worth mentioning 32/64 bit The VSTS build agent launches PowerShell 64bit (as does the PowerShell command line on dev PC), but VSCode launches it 32bit. Whilst working my StyleCop extension this caused me a problem as StyleCop it seems can only load dictionaries for spell checking based rules when in a 32bit shell....

I wanted to add some level of static analysis to our Typescript projects, TSLint being the obvious choice. To make sure it got run as part of our build release process I wanted to wire it into our SonarQube system, this meant using the community TSLintPlugin, which is still pre-release (0.6 preview at the time of writing). I followed the installation process for plugin without any problems setting the TSLint path to match our build boxes...

I thought I had a problem with our TFS Lab Manager setup, 80% of our environments had disappeared. I wondered if it was rights, was it just showing environments I owned? No it was not that. Turns our the issue was a UX/Scrollbar issue. I had MTM full screen in ‘Test Center’ mode, with a long list of test suites, so long a scroll bar was needed and I had scrolled to the bottom of the list...

Background I am finding myself writing a lot of PowerShell at present, mostly for VSTS build extensions. Here I hit a problem (or is it an opportunity for choice?) as to what development environment to use? PowerShell ISE is the ‘best’ experience for debugging a script, but has no source control integration – and it is on all PCs Visual Studio Code has good Git support, but you need to jump through some hoops to get debugging working....

This is a copy of the guest post done on the Microsoft UK web site published on the 7th June 2016 This is a revised version of a post originally published in August 2014. In this revision I have updated version numbers and links for tools used and added a discussion of adapting the process to support VSTS. The code for this post can be found in my GitHub Repo...