Category: Uncategorized
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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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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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Running a Linux SQL Server in a Docker Container
I just reinstalled my PC and needed a database for some simple work. I did not like the idea of installing a full SQL Server on my PC. Too heavy and takes too long. The I remembered that Microsoft recently announced that they can run SQL Server on Linux and…
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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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My Techdays sessions are online!
On October 4 and 5 the Techdays Netherlands were held in the RAI Amsterdam. I had the honor to be invited to speak (the 6th year in row). All sessions were recorded and published to Channel 9 Continuous Delivery 3.0 – The Next Step Link to Channel 9 Session Digital disruption…
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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 up a Windows Docker host in Azure and connect from your local computer
A while ago I blogged about how to set up a Docker host without Visual Studio. Now, half a year later things have changed and so have some steps. Yesterday I spun up a new Windows 2016 machine (CTP5) from the Azure gallery and (of course) it did not work…
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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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Continuous Delivery course at O’Reilly
A few months ago, Marcel de Vries and I created this course for O’Reilly that dives into “Continuous Delivery on the Windows Stack”, and now it is finally released! We talk a lot about Continuous Delivery and use Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and Azure to show you what…
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How Docker will change Microsoft Development
Two months ago we (Xpirit) published a new edition of our Xpirit Magazine. In this magazine I wrote an article on how Docker will change Microsoft Development. In this blog post you will find the introduction. If you want to read the whole article, you can download the PDF of…
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.NET Rocks Interview on Continuous Delivery Rocks
Last month on Techorama I had the great pleasure to be interviewed for the great radio show .NET Rocks. Together with Marcel de Vries we talked about Continuous Delivery 3.0 and everything related. Continuous Delivery 3.0 is all about rethinking the things you do instead of optimizing them and we have some…
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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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My slides from Techorama 2016
Last week I spoke at Techorama Belgium. The title of my session was: Continuous Delivery 3.0 on the Microsoft stack. You can download the slides here This title is interesting in itself because everybody has its own ideas on what Continuous Delivery 3.0 actually means. The bottom line of my…
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Everybody gets a Xamarin!
Originally posted on The mobile chef: This week at Microsoft’s //build/ 2016 conference in San Francisco, Scott Guthrie shared more details about the Xamarin acquisition and what this means for developers on the Microsoft stack. The keynote is worth checking out, also for the great Azure content. More interesting details…
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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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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…
The Road to ALM 