Release Management

Today Brian Harry announced that the first release of TFS 2015 Update 2 is available. It is an RC with a go-live license, which means that Microsoft will support you if you install it in production, and it will be a direct supported upgrade to RTM once it is released. Read the full release notes for Update 2 RC1 here: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/tfs2015-update2-vs One huge thing with the release is that Update 2 includes the new Release Management vNext feature that has up until now only been available in the service (although you can use that for on premise TFS and deployments). But now you don’t have to rely on VSTS for hosting the service, it is now part of TFS 2015 Update 2! ...

I have blogged before about how to deploy an Azure Web App using the new build system in TFS 2015/Visual Studio Team Services. In addition to configure an Azure service endpoint, it is really only a matter of using the built-in Azure Web App Deployment task. However, in many cases I have decided not to use this task myself since it has been lacking a key feature: Applying deployment parameters using the SetParameter.xml file. ...

Since a couple of months back, Microsoft new Release Management service is available in public preview in Visual Studio Team Services. According to the current time plan, it will be released for on-premise TFS in the next update (Update 2). Using a tool like release management allows you to implement a deployment pipeline by grabbing the binaries and any other artifacts from your release build, and then deploy them across different environments with the proper configuration and approval workflow. Building your binaries once and only once is a fundamental principal of implementing continuous delivery, too much can go wrong if you build your application every time you deploy it into a new environment. ...