VSO gets ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses

If the reason you have not been using VSO was concern over where it is hosted, then last week Microsoft made an announcement that could ease some of your worries, or at least your legal departments. VSO now has ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses; for more details see Brian Harry’s blog. This added to the fact that since the end of last October you have been able to choose to host your VSO instance in Europe could well make VSO a more compelling option for many organisations who don’t want to have their own TFS servers on premises

January 19, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Guest post on the Microsoft UK Developers Site on DSC and Release Management prior to Microsoft TechDays event

One of my blog posts has been re-posted on the Microsoft UK Developers blog Resolving the DCS two-step - Release Management vNext deployment This post covers part of what I will be talking about at Microsoft Techdays on the 5th of February . You can register here for this free online event

January 16, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking at Microsoft Techdays on the 5th of February

On the 5th of February I will be presenting at Microsoft’s online Techdays event. My session is entitled ‘How are you going to deploy that? A look at configuration as code’ “It does not matter what platform you are developing for, you are going to have to deploy your product in the end. Too often in the past the question of deployment has been an afterthought. But it need not be this way, there are tools available that can help with deployment of your code and importantly the provisioning the underlying systems they need too....

January 10, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

How to edit registered Release Management deployment agent IP addresses if a VMs IP address changes

I have posted in the past that we have a number of agent based deployments using Release Management 2013.4 that point to network isolated Lab Management environments. Over Christmas we did some maintenance on our underlying Hyper-V servers, so everything got fully stopped and restarted. When the network isolated environment were restarted their DHCP assigned IP addresses on our company domain all changed (maybe we should have had longer DHCP lease times set?...

January 7, 2015 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Failing to unblock downloaded ZIP files causes really strange errors

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of the DSC module the error was “cannot be loaded because you opted not to run this software now”....

January 5, 2015 · 1 min · Richard Fennell