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I have been doing some work on vNext Release Management; I managed to waste a good hour today with a stupid error. In vNext process templates you provide a username and password to be used as the Powershell remoting credentials (in the red box below) My Powershell script also took a parameter username, so this was provided as a custom configuration too (the green box). This was the issue. Not unsurprisingly having two parameters with the same name is a problem....

I will be speaking at Leeds DevOps on the 21st of July on the subject of Desired State Configuration (DSC). ‘In the Windows world, due to its API based architecture, deployment is too often not as simple as copying an EXE and updating a text configuration file. Desired State Configuration is an attempt to ease the pain we suffer in this space. Providing a set of tools that can be leveraged by any set of deployment tools whether in a Windows or heterogeneous environment....

Update 21 Aug 2015 - This post contains all the basic information, but there is an improved PowerShell script discussed in Using Release Management vNext templates when you don’t want to use DSC scripts – A better script Many web sites are basically forms over data, so you need to deploy some DB schema and something like a MVC website. Even for this ’bread and butter’ work it is important to have an automated process to avoid human error....

With the help of the Release Management team at Microsoft I now have a working REST based automated TFS Build to Release Management pipeline. Previously we were using a TFS automated build and then manually triggering our agent based Release Management pipeline. When we moved to a vNext PS/DSC based RM pipeline I took the chance to automate the link using REST via a PowerShell script to trigger the initial deployment....

Whilst setting up Application Insights on one of our web sites I hit a problem. The target site appeared to be working OK, but if I setup a ping test it failed. Digging into the failure, as with much of Application Insights just keep clicking to go deeper, I found the issue was that a CSS file was failing to load. Presumably on this Umbraco site the CSS file is meant to be loaded for the site but none of the styles are actually used, hence the site renders OK....

Today was my day for semi annual Media Center (MCE) problems. As usual they seemed to start with an unexpected power issue, a local power cut, maybe the answer is a UPS for the TV setup? Once the PC was rebooted it had forgotten it had any tuners. If I tried to view live TV or re-setup the TV signal it just hung with a spinning ‘toilet bowl of death’ cursor....

Had a strange issue today while editing our standard TFS 2013 XAML build process template to add an optional post drop script block to allow a Release Management pipeline to be triggered via REST. Our standard template includes a block for enabling and disabling Typemock, after editing our template to add the new script block (nowhere near the Typemock section) our builds failed with the error TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition BMISS....

If you came to our re:Build and re:Ignite events last week and want more information on the subjects we covered, remember that all the sessions from both the Microsoft Build and Ignite events are available at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015 and http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015. On these sites you can find videos of the sessions and slide stacks, hours of family viewing.

Did you miss content from Microsoft Build and Ignite events? Well you can catch up on Channel9, but we at Black Marble are running free round up events on the 20th May in Leeds. Why not come and talk to Black Marble and Microsoft staff who attended the events? To register go to the Black Marble events site.

Recently whilst at a clients one of our consultants came across an interesting issue; the client was using Selenium to write web tests, they wanted to trigger them both from Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) as local automated tests, and also run them using BrowserStack for multi browser regression testing. The problem was to import the tests into MTM they needed to be written in MsTest and for BrowserStack nUnit. As they did not want to duplicate each test what could they ?...