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I am pleased to announce that I have just made public on the VSTS marketplace a new version of my VSTS Generate Release Notes extension. This new version now supports both VSTS/TFS vNext Builds and vNext Releases. The previous versions only supported the generation of release notes as part of a build. The adding of support for release has meant I have had to rethink the internals of how the templates is process as well as the way templates are passed into the task and where results are stored...

I have just completed the upgrade of our Blog Server to BlogEngine 3.3. This upgrade is a bit more complex than the usual upgrade as between 3.2 to 3.3 there is a change to Razor views for all the widgets. This means you need to remove all the old widgets you have and re-add them using the new razor equivalents. As our blog is backed by SQL, this mean a SQL script to clear down the old widgets, then a manual add of the new versions on each blog we have on our server....

Tracking the current version of StyleCop is a bit awkward. Last week I got an automated email from CodePlex saying 4.7.52.0 had been released . I thought this was the most up to date version, so upgraded my StyleCop command line wrapper and my VSTS StyleCop task from 4.7.47.0 to 4.7.52.0. However, I was wrong about the current version. I had not realised that the StyleCop team had forked the code onto GitHub....

Whilst working with the new Release Management features in VSTS/TFS 2015.2 I found I needed to pass in configuration variables i.e. server name, Db name, UID and Password to create a SQL server via an Azure Resource Management Template release step and a connection string to the same SQL instance for a web site’s web.config, set using an MSDeploy release step using token replacement (as discussed in this post) Now I could just create RM configuration variables for both the connection string and ARM settings,...

There is no easy way to work out how long a TFS in place upgrade will take, there are just too many factors to make any calculation reasonable Start and end TFS version Quality/Speed of hardware Volume of source code Volume of work items Volume of work item attachments The list goes on…. The best option I have found to a graph various upgrades I have done and try to make an estimate based in the shape of the curve....

In the past I have posted about the vNext TFS build tasks I have made available via my GitHub repo. Over the past few weeks I have been making an effort to repackage these as extensions in the new VSTS/TFS Marketplace, thus making them easier to consume in VSTS or using the new extensions support in TFS 2015.2 This it is an ongoing effort, but I pleased to announce the release of the first set of extension....

Did you know TFS was 10 years old this week? I have been working with TFS all that time, doesn’t time fly, and wow has the product changed from TFS 2005 to 2015/VSTS or what. If you want to find out a bit more about the past 10 years try listening to the latest Radio TFS podcast with Brian Harry

It has been a while since I have mentioned any had new books on TFS/VSTS, and just like buses a couple come along together. These two, one from Tarun Arora and the other from Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both nicely on trend for the big area of interest for many of the companies I am working with at present; best practice ‘cook book’ style guidance on how to best use the tools in an ALM process....

Updated 22 Mar 2016: This task is now available as an extension in the VSTS marketplace A common request I get from clients is how can I create a custom set of release notes for a build? The standard TFS build report often includes the information required (work items and changesets/commits associate with the build) but not in a format that is easy to redistribute. So I decided to create a set to tools to try to help....

Azure provides many ways to scale and structure web site and virtual applications. I recently needed to deploy the following structure where each service endpoint was its own Visual Studio Web Application Project built as a MSDeploy Package http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service1 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service2 http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service3 To do this in the Azure Portal in … Created a Web App for the site http://demo.azurewebsites.net This pointed to the disk location sitewwwoot, I disabled the folder as an application as there is not application running at this level Created a virtual directory api point to sitewwrootapi, again disabling this folder as an application Created a virtual application for each of my services, each with their own folder I knew from past experience I could use MSDeploy to deploy to the root site or the api virtual directory....