Category: Team Foundation Server
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Pushing to an Azure Container Registry from Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is full of great wizards and helpers to make life of the developers easy. One of them is setting up a service connection to an Azure Container Registry. When you go to the Service Connections of your Azure DevOps project and create a new Docker Registry Connection, it…
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Distribute your blessed ARM templates with Universal Packages in Azure DevOps
There is a fine-grained balance between full autonomy of a team and arranging things on a more central level. One of the things I talk about, when I talk about shifting to Rugged DevOps, is the use of blessed libraries, scripts and templates. As an example, if all your teams write…
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Where to start with DevOps Metrics?
Now that more and more teams and organizations are moving towards a DevOps way of working, I get asked the question “What should we measure?” a lot. To be very honest, I find this a very hard question. The main reason is that metrics are always a point of discussion…
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VSTS Rest API – Hard to find methods
This post does not have a lot of text, only an introduction. I use the VSTS Rest API quite a lot and the documentation is great, but not everything is documented or hard to find. In this post, I list some snippets that you can use to get even more…
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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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First encounters with creating a Managed Kubernetes Cluster (AKS) on Azure
Yesterday Microsoft announced in this blogpost thatr the public preview for a Managed Kubernetes Cluster (AKS) is now available. I directly wanted to test this and followed the steps in the blog. They work but I ran into a few tiny errors which were easy to solve if you know where…
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Running a Linux VSTS Agent on Azure Container Instances
About 3 weeks ago, Corey Sanders (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-container-instances/) announced in his blog that Azure Container Instances is in private preview. I think that this new Azure service is very promising. In a nutshell, it is a hosted and managed Container cluster. The only thing you need to take care of is…
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Publish symbols to Azure File Storage with the VSTS Hosted Agent
A while ago I migrated a lot of builds to the Visual Studio Team Services Hosted Agents. This works great. We reduced the number of build servers and agent on-premises and can now easily scal up and down. But .. as it goes… there is always that next thing on…
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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 Chocolatey Gallery
For information how to set up a private Powershell repository on VSTS check this post I just blogged about how to use VSTS Package Management as a private Powershell repository. But here was another need that I had. I wanted a private Chocolatey gallery as well. So I did some…
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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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Only trigger a release when the build changed
I created a Build task for this purpose as well. Check it out here! Back in the early days, when we used XAML builds in TFS (wow that seems like ages ago!), we had the possibility to NOT execute a build when nothing changed in the source code repository. This checkbox “Build…
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Installing a VSTS Build agent on Mac OSX
Today I needed to install the VSTS Build Agent on a Mac Mini in the office so we can build the IPhone App. The great part of the new build infrastructure in VSTS is that it is Cross Platform and we CAN do that. Just download the agent and run the…
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Migrate a complete Git Repository from TFS to VSTS
I am migrating some Git repositories from a TFS server to VSTS. Moving a Git repo including all the history is very simple fo course. Since Git is a Distributed Source Control repository. But I always forget the syntax of moving the “complete” Git repository at once. With all the…
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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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Programmatically promote your package quality with Release Views in VSTS
A short while ago, Package Management in VSTS became publicly available. Agreed, the features in the initial version are not overwhelming, but the potential is very high. If you are not familiar yet, with Package Management in VSTS , I highly recommend you take a look at the documentation on…
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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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Change VSTS release variables at queue time
When creating and queueing new build, a feature that I often use is the “allow change at queue time” checkbox next to the build variables Allowing me to change it at Queue time Sometimes you also want this for releases, but there is no such an option. However, you can do…




