TFS

We have decided that it is time to create a meetup group for people that are interested in the Microsoft ALM and DevOps story! Together with Mathias Olausson and a few other people we have created a new Meetup group and announced the first meeting. Our plan is to continue meeting every month or so to learn about and dicuss new concept and ideas in the area of ALRM and DevOps on the Microsoft stack. This is a wide area, which spans all roles in the development process, so there will be something for everyone. ...

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. ...

With today’s announcement at Microsoft Connect() about the public preview of the next generation of Visual Studio Release Management, it is also time to announce the (imminent) release of a new book that covers among other things this new version of RM. Me and my fellow ALM MVP Mathias Olausson have been working hard during the last 6 months on this book, using early alpha and beta versions of this brand new version of Visual Studio Release Management. Writing about a changing platform can be rather challenging, and our publisher (Apress) have been very patient with us regarding delays and late changes! ...

I often talk to different teams about how they work with Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online. I get a lot of questions about different features, and some of them tend to come up more often than other. So here is a list of 10 features in TFS that I get questions about regularly or that I have noticed a lot of teams don’t know about. It is by no means exhaustive, and it is a mixture of smaller and larger features, but hopefully you will find something here that you didn’t know about before. ...

By now, many of you should have had the chance to at least play with the new build system that was released in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Online. Here is an introductory post I wrote about it when it entered public preview back in January. Doing the basic stuff is very easy using the new build system, especially if you compare it with the old one, which is now referred to as XAML builds. Creating and customizing build definitions is just a matter of adding the tasks that you want to use and configure them properly, everything is done using the web interface that is part of the TFS Web Access. ...

In the brave new world of Microsoft where a lot of the frameworks and languages that they build now are open sourced over at GitHub, it comes as no surprise that GitHub is nicely integrated into both Visual Studio and TFS Build vNext. This makes it very easy to setup builds that gets the source code from your GitHub repo but uses TFS Build vNext to build it. It also allows you to setup CI builds, that is builds that trigger automatically when someone does a commit in the corresponding Git repo. ...

TFS 2015 is around the corner, and with it comes a whole new build system. All the biggest pain points from the existing build system (now called “XAML builds”) are gone and instead we get a light weight build system with a web UI that makes it very easy to customize our build processes and that doesn’t perform a lot of magic such as redirecting your build output for example. In this post, I will show you just how easy it is to setup a build that builds a standard ASP.NET web application, generates a web deploy package as part of the build and then pick up this package and deploys it to a Azure web site. As part of this, you will also see how smooth the integration with Azure is when it comes to connecting your subscription. ...

In my previous post, I showed how you can trigger a release in Visual Studio Release Management from a TeamCity build step. When Visual Studio Release Management 2013 RTM’ed, it came with customized TFS build templates that made it easy to trigger a release from a TFVC or Git build in TFS. These build templates relied on the ReleaseManagementBuild command line client, so it required the VSRM client being installed on the build server. ...