Author: Rene van Osnabrugge
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2 weeks full of highlights
Wow ! Normally I post about VSTS or TFS or just about some other techy stuff but my last 2 weeks were so packed with highlights, both personally and at Xpirit, I just wanted it to share with you. I’ll first give you the executive summary Personally I became ALM…
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Everybody gets a Xamarin!
Originally posted on The mobile chef: This week at Microsoft’s //build/ 2016 conference in San Francisco, Scott Guthrie shared more details about the Xamarin acquisition and what this means for developers on the Microsoft stack. The keynote is worth checking out, also for the great Azure content. More interesting details…
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Building a checkbox in your VSTS custom build task
Update 5/25/2016 Since May 6th 2016, this is default functionality in VSTS. Look for the Checkbox Control section in this post! https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2016-may-6-vso Today I was building a custom build task for the new build system in VSTS. I read the documentation and started to work on the task.json. Besides some strings…
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Running a VS Team Services (VSO) Build Agent in a Windows Docker Container
A while ago I wrote a post on how to run a Visual Studio Online (now called Visual Studio Team Services) Build Agent in a Docker Container on Linux. I got some good feedback on this post and now it is time to do the same trick again but only…
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Upload process template to TFS 2015 gives a version error
Today I was doing some process template customization on a TFS 2015 server. The process template that was in use was one that was created for TFS 2013.4 and worked fine. We did the upgrade and everything was fine as well. But as good practice describes, we also have a…
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Release Management hangs and there is no log in place…
This week I encountered a very strange error with release management 2015.1 (so the old, grey, WPF version) We upgraded our TFS server to 2015.1 and everything was fine. We started a release and everything was fine. But the second time we started a release it only went through the…
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Partially succeeded builds do not show in the build widget
Today I received an email about some strange behavior on the TFS 2015.1 dashboard. The partially succeeded build bars did not show in the widget. A colleague (Thanks Edwin v/d Thiel !) figured out what was wrong. The stylesheet class that was referenced had a casing error. When looking in the code…
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Set DNX_BUILD_VERSION in the VSTS build
In a project where we use ASP.NET 5 (or ASP.NET Core 1.0) we wanted to use dynamic versioning in the build. As described here you can use the asterisk (*) for the version in the project.json file If you set the environment variable DNX_BUILD_VERSION to a value, the asterisk will…
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Set up a Test TFS environment with production databases
I get this question quite a lot. We have a production environment and we want a Test environment for TFS. A Test TFS is quite useful for testing upgrades, setting up builds or testing out some build tasks or just as a sandbox for users who you do not trust…
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Started the Dutch Microsoft ALM Group. First meeting March 3rd
Application Lifecycle Management, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile Scrum etc. All subjects where I am really passionate about. I spent most of my days working on this using tools like Visual Studio Team Services, Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio etc. And it is still very alive! Although ALM is a term…
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Create a Windows Docker Host and connect to it without Visual Studio
I have been exploring Docker on Windows for a while because I think it is very promising that containers can run on the Windows platform as well. I’ve also written a few posts already about Docker but this one is all about creating a Windows Docker Host on Azure and…
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Use Visual Studio Team Services Build to manage your Azure Resource Groups
If you, just like me, have a MSDN subscription you are also provided with some serious Azure Credits. Because I am a Microsoft MVP I received the MSDN Enterprise subscription, allowing me to run 130 euro worth of Azure services. Because I do a lot of demos and experiments I…
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Unattended install of a Visual Studio Team Services (a.k.a. VSO) Build Agent
A while ago I was looking at installing the VSTS build Agent on Linux and was searching for the possibility to uninstall it unattended. I was doing this because I wanted to run my agent in a Docker container and on startup I wanted to run a configured agent. I…
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Presentation on Dutch Docker Day
Last Friday I did a talk on Dutch Docker Day. Together with my colleague Alex Thissen We talked about “Dockerizing your ASP.NET Application on Windows and Linux”. We showed how you can use ASP.NET 5 to run cross platform in a Linux Docker Container, on a Mac and in an…
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Integrate your on-premise ticket system with Visual Studio Team Services (fka VS Online)
There is a lot going on in the TFS/VSTS world. I hear more and more customers talking about the move to VSTS and I think this is a very good trend. Many scenarios that were showstoppers before are in place on VSTS and some scenarios are coming on short –term.…
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Using OneGet PackageManager in Windows 10 and Windows 2016 Server Container
I am experimenting with OneGet, the new Powershell PackageManager for Windows. It is included in Windows 10 and in Windows Server Container and Windows Server 2016. The PackageManager is something I learned to appreciate when I was experimenting with Docker on Linux. There we use apt-get to get software from…
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Running a Visual Studio Build vNext agent in a Docker container
Update: 27-10-2016 Take a look at the official Microsoft Docker Images on DockerHub that also contain a Build agent With the introduction of the new build engine in Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server 2015, Microsoft also introduced real cross-platform build capabilities, The VSO-BuildAgent and tasks are both published…
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Uploading a custom build.vNext task
Originally posted on Real ALM: With the introduction of the new build.vNext build system in Visual Studio Online and TFS 2015 (currently in RC) creating a build definition has become a lot easier. There are already quite a lot of tasks available, that allow you to build, test and deploy…
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Get started with Docker on Azure for Microsoft developers and/or Linux noobs
I said it earlier in a previous post. The world is changing. And especially the world of Microsoft Developers. In my post about modern tools I presented a list with tools that a developers must have in his toolbox. This list did not contain a lot of Microsoft tools. In…
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Using Personal Access Tokens to access Visual Studio Online
People who use Visual Studio Online for a while are probably familiar with the alternate credentials. These are used when accessing the REST API or when using an external client for accessing your Git repositories. You configure your alternate credentials on your [My Profile] page and fill a username and…
The Road to ALM 