Hello to Visual Studio Team Services

After Microsoft’s announcements at todays Connect() event, Visual Studio Online (VSO) is now Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It is a good job I never changed the tag on this blog from VSTS when Microsoft dropped the Team System name a few years ago. For a run down of all the VSTS announcements have a look at Brian Harry’s blog

November 18, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Why you need to use vNext build tasks to share scripts between builds

Whilst doing a vNext build from a TFVC repository I needed map both my production code branch and a common folder of scripts that I intended to use in a number of builds, so my build workspace was set to Map – $/BM/mycode/main - my production code Map – $/BM/BuildDefinations/vNextScripts - my shared PowerShell I wish to run in different builds e.g. assembly versioning. As I wanted this to be a CI build, I also set the trigger to $/tp1/mycode/main...

November 17, 2015 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Versioning a VSIX package as part of the TFS vNext build (when the source is on GitHub)

I have recently added a CI build to my GitHub stored ParametersXmlAddin VSIX project. I did this using Visual Studio Online’s hosted build service, did you know that this could used to build source from GitHub? As part of this build I wanted to version stamp the assemblies and the resultant VSIX package. To do the former I used the script documented on MSDN, for the latter I also used the same basic method of extracting the version from the build number as used in the script for versioning assemblies....

November 10, 2015 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Why can’t I assign a VSO user as having ‘eligible MSDN’ using an AAD work account?

When access VSO you have two authentication options; either a LiveID (or an MSA using it’s newest name) or a Work Account ID (a domain account). The latter is used to provide extra security, so a domain admin can easily control who has access to a whole set of systems. It does assume you have used Azure Active Directory (AAD) that is sync’d with your on premises AD, and that this AAD is used to back your VSO instance....

November 4, 2015 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

SonarQube 5.2 released

At my session at DDDNorth I mentioned that some of the settings you needed to configure in SonarQube 5.1, such as DB connection strings for SonarRunner, would not need to be made once 5.2 was release. Well it was released today. Most important changes for we are Server handles all DB connections LDAP support for user authentication Should make the install process easier

November 3, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell