Fix for ‘Web deployment task failed. (Unknown ProviderOption:DefiningProjectFullPath. Known ProviderOptions are:skipInvalid’ errors on TFS 2013.2 build

When working with web applications we tend to use MSDeploy for distribution. Our TFS build box, as well as producing a _PublishedWebsite copy of the site, produce the ZIP packaged version we use to deploy to test and production servers via PowerShell or IIS Manager To create this package we add the MSBuild Arguments **/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:IsPackaging=True ** This was been working fine, until I upgraded our TFS build system to 2013....

April 7, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Upgrading a VSTO project from VS 2008 to 2013

To make sure all our Word documents are consistent we use a Word template that include VSTO action pane. This allow us to insert standard blocks of text, T&C and the like, and also makes sure document revisions and reviews are correctly logged. We have used this for years without any issues, but I recently needed to make some changes to the underlying Word .dotx template and I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get it rebuilding in Visual Studio 2013 for Office 2013 (previously it had been built against Visual Studio 2008 generation tools)...

April 7, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

TFS 2013.2 has RTM’d

TFS 2013.2 got RTM’d last night and is available on MSDN; interestingly Visual Studio 2013.2 is still only an RC, we have to wait for that to RTM. As we had a good proportion of our team at Build 2014 I took the chance to do the upgrade today. It went smoothly, no surprises, though the installation phase (the middle bit after the copy and before the config wizard) took a while....

April 3, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Looking forward to speaking at Techorama in May

Looking forward to speaking at Techorama in May, great range of speakers and subjects. Hope to see you there, for ticket details see http://www.techorama.be/tickets/

March 30, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Getting started with Release Management with network isolated Lab Management environments

Our testing environments are based on TFS Lab Management, historically we have managed deployment into them manually (or at least via a PowerShell script run manually) or using TFS Build. I thought it time I at least tried to move over to Release Management. The process to install the components of Release Management is fairly straight forward, there are wizards that ask little other than which account to run as...

March 29, 2014 · 3 min · Richard Fennell