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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....