All change - new SKUs for Visual Studio 2015

All change again on Visual Studio SKU licensing, have a look at the blog post on new SKUs for the 2015 release and also the 2015 product site. Basically it is a simplification. You can find the detailed feature break down on the comparison site

March 31, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Cross platform build with TFS 2015 vNext Build

I have been preparing for my Techorama session on TFS vNext build. One of the demo’s I am planning is to use the Node based cross platform build agent to build something on a Linux VM. Turns out this takes a few undocumented steps to get this going with the CTP of TFS 2015 The process I followed was: I installed a Mint 17 VM On the VM, I installed the Node VSOAgent as detailed in the npm documentation (or I could have built it from from source from GitHub to get the bleeding edge version) I created a new agent instance...

March 30, 2015 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

We are hosting a free event on Visual Studio ALM on the 18th March

Black Marble are hosting, at our offices, a Microsoft event on the 18th March on ALM with Visual Studio & TFS 2013. This is a repeat of the sell out event we hosted in the autumn. For details of the event and registration see the booking site

February 28, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My DSC session is up at TechDays Online 2015 On-Demand

A couple of weeks ago I presented on DSC and Release Management as part of the Microsoft UK TechDays Online 2015 event. All the sessions from this three day event are now available on demand at TechDays Online 2015 on-demand sessions. You do seem to have to register/login to see the content, so I can’t deep link to my session, but browsing the catalogue is a good idea there are some great sessions

February 17, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Build arguments are not returned for a build definition via the TFS API if they are left as default values

We use my TFS Alerts DSL to perform tasks when our TFS build complete, one of these is a job to increment the minor version number and reset the version start date (the value that generates third field – days since a point in time) if a build is set to the quality ‘release’ e.g. 1.2.99.[unique build id] where 99 is the days count since some past date could change to 1....

February 11, 2015 · 2 min · Richard Fennell