VSTS

Whilst listening to a recent Radio TFS it was mentioned that TFS Aggregator uses the C# SOAP based Azure DevOps APIs; hence needed a major re-write as these APIs are being deprecated. Did you know that there was a REST API alternative to TFS Aggregator? My Azure DevOps Services & Server Alerts DSL is out there, and has been for a while, but I don’t think used by many people. It aims to do the same as TFS Aggregator, but is based around Python scripting....

There is a general move in Azure DevOps Pipelines to using YAML, as opposed to the designer, to define your pipelines. This is particularly enforced when using them via the new GitHub Marketplace Azure Pipelines method where YAML appears to be the only option. This has shown up a hole in my Pipeline Tasks documentation, I had nothing on YAML! So I have added a YAML usage page for each set of tasks in each of my extensions e....

Azure DevOps has had some serious issue over the past couple of weeks with availability here in Europe. A really good open and detailed root cause analysis has just been posted by the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. It also covers the mitigations they are putting place to make sure this same issues do not occur again. We all have to remember that the cloud is not magic. Cloud service providers will have problems like any on-premise services; but trying to hide them does nothing to build confidence....

When I started creating OSS extensions for Azure DevOps Pipelines (starting on TFSPreview, then VSO, then VSTS and now named Azure DevOps) I made the mistake of putting all my extensions in a single GitHub repo. I thought this would make life easier, I was wrong, it should have been a repo per extension. I have considered splitting the GitHub repo, but as a number of people have forked it, over 100 at the last count, I did not want to start a chain of chaos for loads of people....

Whilst I was off work last week TFS 2018 Update 3 was released. As stated in the 2018.3 release notes this is the final bug fix update release of TFS 2018. The next major release of TFS will not be named TFS 2019 as you might have expected, but will use the new name of Azure DevOps Server. You can see the features planned for this next release in the Azure DevOps Features Timeline