Category: Build
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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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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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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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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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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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Set output variable in a Powershell VSTS Build Task
Currently I am building a pipeline that performs some actions on Azure. For example creating a Azure Storage Account. When doing this, I want to return some values from my Powershell script back into a variable of my Build Pipeline, so I can use this in another task. After some searching…
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Controlling build quality using Build Tags and VSTS Release Management
On many occasions a release is a composition of many different artifacts, like product MSI’s, Shared Assemblies, Documentation etc.. I like to compare it with a big box that you use when moving. You fill it up with all sort of little boxes and other stuff and you label it.…
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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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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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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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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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Error in TFS 2013 build – Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.WebApi
Recently I installed TFS 2013.2 and modified some Build Templates. I also installed a separate Build Server that executes these builds for me. My build template was based on the default TFS 2013 Build template (Tfvctemplate.12.xaml) When my build executed, it ran for a while, but eventually it stopped with…
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TFS Build throws CRC in GZip footer error
This week I encountered a really nasty problem with the Team Foundation Server Build Agents. Before I walk you through the details let me first explain the situation. Scenario At a customer we are building a new build “farm” (a little farm 😉 ). Currently we have 2 build servers…
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Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 8 Related Work Items in a Build Report
In this series of blog posts I like to highlight some features of TFS/Visual Studio that people seem to overlook. In my day to day job I often see that people don’t know about certain feature that are available in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio or some of the Powertools.…
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Custom Build Activities Type is greyed out in Build Definition editor
Lately I am quite busy with building Custom Build activities for TFS 2012. I also did this in TFS 2010 but it seems that I avoided some issues there. In my previous blog posts I described some migration issues with TFS build. This is about an issue I had with…
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‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IProjectFile’ is obsolete
For my customer I was implementing some advanced BuildNumbering mechanism (Here can you find a good post about this). Because it was important that the stuff worked, I wrote some Unit Tests. I usually do that and need IBuildDetail. Jim Lamb has a great post about how to stub The…
The Road to ALM 