Category: Articles
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English as the New Programming Language
There is a growing belief that English is becoming the new programming language. At first glance it sounds like marketing hype, another inflated promise in a field already full of them. But look closely at how teams work today, and you start to see something real happening. Not because English…
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Don’t let AI Optimize the Wrong 30%
There’s a strange pattern emerging in the way companies talk about AI and software development. Almost every conversation focuses on how AI can help developers write code faster. That sounds compelling at first glance. After all, developers spend a lot of time writing code, so anything that speeds that up…
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Knowledge Driven Culture
In my previous blogpost about building an Engineering Culture I briefly touched upon the pillar “Knowledge Driven”. This pillar is really about culture. About behaviour and about mindset. You can only have a knowledge driven culture if people are willing to share knowledge, and if people are open to receive…
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Aligned Autonomy in Practice
In my previous blog post I talked about Engineering Culture and how important it is to embrace the fact that you need to behave like a software company. In this blog post I want to dive a little bit deeper in to an aspect of the pillar “Empowering Operating Model”.…
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Growing your DevOps Mindset
Practicing DevOps successfully requires knowledge on hard skill areas such as continuous delivery and automated testing. But the most important part is creating a culture where people show courage, work on teambuilding, practice DevOps leadership and have a continuous improvement mindset. Developing these soft skills is hard. One of the…
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Secure or Compliant? That is the question!
Compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, polices, and regulations. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_compliance) Within many organizations,…
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Setting up Sonatype Nexus 3 as your Windows Docker Container Registry
Currently I am working at Rabobank. Rabobank uses Sonatype Nexus as their artifact repository for all kinds of packages and also for Docker Containers. Since there are a few Microsoft .Net teams are moving towards Docker, the need for Docker containers arose as well. So we created a Windows Base…
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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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Integrating TeamCity with Team Foundation Server – Part 2
In my previous post I introduced TeamCity as an alternative build server to use in conjunction with Team Foundation Server. This post mainly focused on getting started with TeamCity and building sources coming from Team Foundation Server. At the end of this previous post I talked about the dependency of…
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Integrating TeamCity with Team Foundation Server – Part 1
In this cross-platform world, where everything integrates with … well everything, it is not unusual to come across companies that use more than one system for their Application Lifecycle Management. Team Foundation Sever offers a great solution if it comes to ALM. Work Item Management, Build Management, Release Management etc.…
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Modern tools glossary
Maybe I am getting old, maybe I am too busy with other stuff but the number of frameworks, tools and utilities has seemed to grow exponentially over the last years. As a Microsoft developer from “the early” I usually only had to worry about a new version of Visual Studio,…
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A team is a group of people … A group of people is NOT a team
In my work as a consultant I visit many companies. Sometimes for a day and sometimes for a longer period. What I see more than once is that organizations are still organized as departments. For example an application support department or an IT-Pro department. Surely this is not a problem.…
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Start with Visual Studio Release Management vNext–VS RM for Dummies
Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3 came with Visual Studio Release Management vNext. vNext is, next to the deployments with agents, another way of doing deployments with VSRM. The most important thing in vNext is that you can do deployments to machines, without having to install an agent. This is…
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Silently install and configure a TFS Build server with Powershell DSC
A while ago Powershell Desired State Configurations (DSC) was introduced. Powershell DSC allows you to create a configuration of a specific machine in a powershell file. The Powershell engine takes care of rolling out this configuration. This configuration snippet makes sure a IIS is present. If it already is it…
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The Road to Continuous Delivery–Part 1
Introduction Continuous Delivery. You hear and read a lot about it lately and it seems to be or become a trend. What I see in the field is that companies think about Continuous Delivery but are not completely sure what it actually means. Let alone that they can oversee the…
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Combining TFS Version Control and Git with Git-TF
For a customer I am (together with my colleague Jasper Gilhuis) setting up a hybrid solution regarding Version Control. Some Scrum teams use Git as their primary Source Control system and most of them use TFS Version Control. What we see at different organizations is that it requires the…
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A practical guide for dealing with capacikill in TFS
Capacikill? What the … is that? Actually it is a word I made up. To be honest it was a colleague who talked about capacity in a noisy room and I thought I heard him say it. I understood capacikill and the word had a meaning to me right away.…
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TFS as perfect tool for Scrum (Part 5) – Sprint Review and Retrospective
This is the fifth and final part of the series TFS as perfect tool for Scrum. The series is based on my session that I presented at Microsoft TechDays. You can find more introduction in part 1 The agenda for this series is: 1. Introduction in Scrum and TFS 2.…
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Release Management with InRelease
Originally posted on Jasper Gilhuis: In this post I will highlight the latest addition to the Visual Studio product suite, InRelease. This Release Management tool, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, is meant for bridging the gap between Development and Operations by providing a clear, repeatable, automated deployment procedure. This…
The Road to ALM 