Category: Guidance
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REST call to get all tasks in your VSTS account
This time, a small and simple post. I was working on a solution to get all tasks used in multiple build definitions. When you get the Build Definition with the REST API, you see a reference to the tasks by it’s GUID. But the displayname, group etc, is not displayed…
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Using VSTS Package Management as a private Powershell Gallery
For information how to set up a private Chocolatey repository on VSTS check this post Let me start by saying that I really like VSTS package management. Earlier I blogged about Release Views and I also like the integration with the whole build/release eco system. That said, I was quite annoyed…
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Trigger Release Pipeline only for Scheduled builds
Currently I am working on some build and release pipelines to deploy some websites automatically. I have some CI builds running, and some scheduled buils that are deployed automatically. This works fine, but there is some waste in the process. My CI build is the same as my scheduled build, with…
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Run Functional (Coded) UI Tests in your VSTS Release Pipeline
Today I was trying to run some CodedUI test from my VSTS Release pipeline. The process is quite straightforward but there were some tiny catches I’d like to share with you Let me first show the pipeline I have created
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Order your VSTS Product Backlog based on the order within your Feature Backlog
I know, the title is crap but I just don’t know how to call it properly. Let me just give me the real life example. I have this pretty straightforward Product Backlog But I also have this feature hierarchy. Within the features I prioritize my Backlog items. The features also are ranked…
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Copy files (and run tests) on a remote machine back to the VSTS build and release agent
This week I was working on a script, running in my VSTS release pipeline that executed Pester tests on a remote machine. Running Pester tests on the VSTS Build and Release Agent work fine with one the awesome tasks on the Visual Studio Marketplace, but this was about running the…
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Call VSTS REST API from Release Management
Update 22/6/2016 That’s how fast things go. Since this blogpost there has been a new update on VSTS that allows you to access the OAuth token by just clicking a checkbox. In the Release Environment, click the elipsis asnd select Deployment Conditions (or Configure Variables etc.). It opens a new…
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Call VS Team Services (VSTS) REST API from your Build Pipeline
Today I had the necessity to call the Visual Team Services (VSTS) REST API to get the code changes associated to the build I was currently running. I want these changes to get all the files and to do some actions with the files that were changed. First I tried to…
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Inherited Deny due to Access Levels
Yesterday I was building some logic against the TFS API and used impersonation to do that. One of the things that is needed in order to allow a call to TFS to be impersonated is to give a user the “Make Requests on behalf of others” permission. This server level…
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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 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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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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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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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 