Currently, Microsoft is working hard on a complete rewrite of the TFS Build system. They announced this, among other things, at the Connect event back in November and did a short demo of it. It is not yet available, but as part of the MVP program, a few of us has now been fortunate enough to get access to an early preview of the new build system. Note: This version is in pre-alpha state, meaning that a lot of things can and will change until the final version! ...
The last couple of updates to Visual Studio has included a lot of new functionality for Visual Studio Release Management. The biggest one is the introduction of so called vNext releases, that leverages Powershell DSC for carrying out the provisioning and deployments of environments and applications. Also included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 was the introduction of a REST API that allows us to both trigger new releases and read back information about them. This API is only available for vNext release templates, and will probably not be implemented for the “old” agentbased deployments. ...
The last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project. Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project. ...
Problem One of our customers recently had a problem with NuGet restore when they created a new build template, based on the standard TfvcTemplate.12.xaml template. In TFS 2013, package restore is done automatically by the default build templates. It is configured as part of the RunMSBuild activity, where you can enable and disable this by setting the EnableNuGetPackageRestore property: However, when we were executing the builds we got the following warning in the build log: ...
Almost four years ago I wrote a post on how to create a build definition programmatically using the TFS 2010 API. The code is partyl still valid, but since a lot of the information in a build definition is dependent on the build process template, the code in the blog does not work properly for the TFS 2013 default build templates. In addition, since the introduction of Git in TFS 2013, there are some other differences in how you create a build definition for a Git team project compared to a TFVC team project. ...
As you probably already know, Microsoft recently acquired InRelease, a release management product build by InCycle software that integrates tightly with Team Foundation Server. This acquisition fills a huge gap in the Visual Studio ALM suite, letting customers handle the release management and automatic deployment of their solution. This is a crucial feature for enabling Continuous Deployment. In this post I will show you how to get started with using InRelease, by installing it and setting up your first release including automatic deployment to a staging server. I expect to blog some more about InRelease in the near future, looking at the nitty gritty details of release automation and deployment using InRelease. ...
The last couple of months I have been working together with Mathias Olausson, Mattias Sköld and Joachim Rossberg on a new book project for Apress that has just been published. The book is called Pro Team Foundation Service and covers all aspects of working with Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. I have mainly worked on the chapter related to automated build and continuous deployment, but also with some of the other chapters. ...
Extension available at: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/9ed2d30c-a692-42b0-a21d-cdc8d2bf322c I have been playing around a bit lately with extending Team Explorer 2012, mostly because it is fun but also to fix a little nagging feature that should have been there from the beginning. Often I (and a lot of other people) find myself wanting to associate several consecutive changesets to the same work item. The problem is that Team Explorer does not remember this, instead I have to either remember the ID or use a query that hopefully will match the work item. ...
Running Static Code Analysis (SCA) is something that you should be doing regularly to verify your code base against a large set of rules that will check your code for potential problems and how it comply with standard patterns such as naming conventions for example. Microsoft include several different rule sets that you can use for starters, but you can build your own rule sets as well, that contain the rule that you want to use, In addition, you can write your own custom rules and add these to your rule sets. ...
During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Terje Sandstrøm has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores! The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing. You can find it at http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389 The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working. It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites. ...