New version of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in now supports VS2017 too

I have just published Version 1.5 of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in . After much fiddling this VSIX now supports VS2017 as well as VS2013 and VS2015. The complexity was that VS2017 uses a new VSIX format, V3. You have to makes changes to the project that generates the VSIX and to the VSIX manifest too. The FAQ says you can do this within VS2015 my hand, but I had no luck getting it right....

January 29, 2017 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Can’t add users to a VSTS instance backed by an Azure Directory

I have a VSTS instance that is backed by an Azure Directory. This is a great way to help secure a VSTS instance, only users in the Azure Directory can be added to VSTS, not just any old MSA (LiveIDs). This is a directory that can be shared with any other Azure based services such as O365, and centrally managed and linked to an on-premises Active Directory. When I tried to add a user to VSTS, one that was a valid user in the Azure Directory, their account did not appear in the available users drop down....

January 26, 2017 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Version 2.0.x of my Generate Release Notes VSTS Task has been released with release rollup support

I have just released a major update to my Generate Release Notes VSTS Build extension. This V2 update adds support to look back into past releases to find when there was a successful release to a given stage/environment and creates a rollup set of build artifacts, and hence commits/changesets and workitems, in the release notes. This has been a long running request on GitHub for this extension which I am pleased to have been able to address....

January 5, 2017 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

A nice relaxing Christmas break (and by the way I migrated our on-premises TFS to VSTS as well)

Over the Christmas break I migrated our on premises TFS 2015 instance to VSTS. The reason for the migration was multi-fold: We were blocked on moving to TFS 2017 as we could not easily upgrade our SQL cluster to SQL 2014 We wanted to be on the latest, greatest and newest features of VSTS/TFS We wanted to get away from having to perform on-premises updates every few months To do the migration we used the public preview of the TFS to VSTS Migrator....

January 3, 2017 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

My TFSAlertsDSL project has moved to GitHub and become VSTSServiceHookDsl

Introduction A while ago I create the TFSAlertsDSL project to provide a means to script responses to TFS Alert SOAP messages using Python. The SOAP Alert technology has been overtaken by time with the move to Service Hooks. So I have taken the time to move this project over to the newer technology, which is supported both on TFS 2015 (onwards) and VSTS. I also took the chance to move from CodePlex to GitHub and renamed the project to VSTSServiceHookDsl....

December 21, 2016 · 3 min · Richard Fennell