Category: Tips & Tricks
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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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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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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…
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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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Build fails when associating work items
Recently I ran into a strange problem. I modified a work item type definition and added a field. So far, so good. The field could be edited and everyone was happy. But after that, my build failed. As you may or may not know you can choose to associate work…
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Trigger a vNext release template from a build definition throws Http Error 500
Last week I was busy with some work on a vNext Release template. When my release worked I wanted to trigger that release from my build definition. Where as in the agent-based Release Management it was a matter of checking a checkbox and using a different Build Template that triggers…
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Making a Work Item Read Only when it has a certain state
I am busy at a customer with implementing some security rules on work items. As you might or moght not know the work item security is quite limited. My scenario is as follows: Only users in group XYZ kan make a state transition from [Draft] to [Approved] When the item…
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Bulk destroy Work Items from Team Foundation Server
WARNING: Destroy work items is a irreversible action so use with caution and at your own risk! Lately I am quire busy with all kinds of migration work to Team Foundation Server. This means a lot of testing, modifying and re-testing. Because the target Team Project has quite some modifications…
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Insert an inline image into a Work Item with the TFS API
On the verge of 2014 I wanted to share a last post with you. At the moment I am working on a migration tool to migrate from another system to TFS 2013. The source system contains a lot of items with a description that contains images. Not as an attachment but…
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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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Create a Trend chart in Visual Studio Online
As you might have noticed from some of my previous posts on this blog, I really like reports. I wrote about how to customize them (here, here and here), how you should use them in your ALM implementation and how to use PowerPivot to your advantage. When you read these…
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Creating welcome pages on VSO made easy with Markdown files
In of the recent updates on Visual Studio Online a very nice feature was introduced. Welcome pages. When you want to share some information about you project or other information with your team, what is the place to do that? When working on-premise you maybe have a SharePoint portal or…
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Download Visual Studio Web Installers as a complete package
When you download Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, Team Explorer etc. from the public Microsoft site you always get a small Web installer. Surely enough this does not contain al files, so when you click it, it starts downloading the remaining Gigabytes. This is nasty sometimes when you are at…
The Road to ALM 