VSTS | But it works on my PC!

Using VSTS Gates to help improve my deployment pipeline of VSTS Extensions to the Visual Studio Marketplace

My existing VSTS CI/CD process has a problem that the deployment of a VSTS extension, from the moment it is uploaded to when it’s tasks are available to a build agent, is not instantiation. The process can potentially take a few minutes to roll out. The problem this delay causes is a perfect candidate for using VSTS Release Gates; using the gate to make sure the expected version of a task is available to an agent before running the next stage of the CD pipeline e....

Building private VSTS build agents using the Microsoft Packer based agent image creation model

Background Having automated builds is essential to any good development process. Irrespective of the build engine in use, VSTS, Jenkins etc. you need to have a means to create the VMs that are running the builds. You can of course do this by hand, but in many ways you are just extending the old ‘it works on my PC – the developer can build it only on their own PC’ problem i....

Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline with Semantic Versioning

I wrote a post recently Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline. I realised since writing it that it does not address the issue of if you wish to version your ARM Templates using Semantic Versioning. My JSON versioning task I used did not support the option of not extracting a numeric version number e.g. 1.2.3.4 from a VSTS build number. To address this limitation I have modified my Version JSON file task to address....

Creating test data for my Generate Release Notes Extension for use in CI/CD process

As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful running of a given build. So if the last release of the task extension was successful then the next set of tests have no associations to go in the release notes, not exactly exercising all the code paths!...

How I fixed my problem that my VSTS Build Extension was too big to upload to the Marketplace

Whist adding a couple of new tasks to my VSTS Manifest Versioning Extension I hit the problem that VSIX package became too big to upload to the Marketplace. The error I saw in my CI/CD VSTS pipeline was``` ##vso[task.logissue type=error;]error: Failed Request: Bad Request(400) - The extension package size ‘23255292 bytes’ exceeds the maximum package size ‘20971520 bytes’ 1. They get a list of files 2. Extract a version number from the build number 3....