Category: Team Foundation Server
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Shrink the physical size of an Azure Virtual machine VHD
At a customer I am helping to set up a pipeline to spin up a complete new environment every night. The environment consists of multiple machines. 2 of the machines are preconfigured and cannot be automated (not now at least) with ARM and DSC to create everything from code (which…
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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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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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Configure your load test against different URL’s within your Release Pipeline
Yesterday I was preparing some demo’s for my NDC talk in June. have a simple website that deploy to Azure by using the Build and Release Pipeline functionality. I thought it would be great to run a Cloud Based Load Test as part of this pipeline and that is what…
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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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Create a Windows Docker Host and connect to it without Visual Studio
I have been exploring Docker on Windows for a while because I think it is very promising that containers can run on the Windows platform as well. I’ve also written a few posts already about Docker but this one is all about creating a Windows Docker Host on Azure and…
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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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Integrate your on-premise ticket system with Visual Studio Team Services (fka VS Online)
There is a lot going on in the TFS/VSTS world. I hear more and more customers talking about the move to VSTS and I think this is a very good trend. Many scenarios that were showstoppers before are in place on VSTS and some scenarios are coming on short –term.…
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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 