Visual Studio Team Services

Today Microsoft announced Azure DevOps, which is partly a rebranding of the existing Visual Studio Team Services but also has some exciting news. The gist of the rebranding is that Azure DevOps is now a suite of service, where each service cna be acquired and used separately from the other ones. If you only want to use source control (and use some other CI/CD system) that’s fine. Do you have your code over at GitHub and want to use the CI/CD services in Azure DevOps? Works perfectly! By breaking the whole suite down into smaller services, it will make it easier for customers to find the best fit for their needs, without having to invest in the whole suite. Of course, you will still be able to easily get the whole suite when creating new accounts. ...

In March, Mathias Olausson and I will run two fullday deep dive in continuous delivery and microservices on Azure. During the day you will learn about microservice architecture and how to build and deploy these using container technology and cloud services in Microsoft Azure. The agenda looks like this: Microservices architecture Design principles- Breaking up the monolith - Implementing trunk based development practices with Visual Studio Team Services Feature flags- Pull requests- Branch/Build policies - Using container techonologies for packaging and delivering applications with zero downtime Docker for Windows- Kubernetes Azure Container registry Azure Container Services (AKS) Deployment pipelines with Visual Studio Team Services ...

If you are running your applications in Azure, and in particular on PaaS, you need to take a look ARM templates as a way to manage your environments. ARM templates let’s you define and deploy your entire environment using JSON files that you store together with the rest of your source code. The deployment of ARM templates are idempotent, meaning that you can run them many times and it will always produce the same result. ...

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. ...

This post does not really cover something new, but since I find myself explain this to people now and then, I thought that I’d write a quick post on the subject. So, we want to create a web deploy package as part of our automated build, and then take this package and deploy it to multiple environments, where each environment can have different configuration settings, using VSTS Release Management. Since we only want to build our package once, we have to apply the environment specific settings at deployment time, which means we will use Web Deploy parameters. ...

Last year I had a great time speaking at the DevSum conference, the biggest .NET developer conference in Sweden. Back then, I talked about moving your development to the cloud using Visual Studio Team Services. Active Solution, where I work, was a gold partner for this event and in addition to me my colleagues Alan Smith and Peter Örneholm also spoke at the conference. We had a lot of fun in our booth showing the Lego robots running on Raspberry PIs, connected to Azure for movement control and result collection. ...

The new build system in Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Team Services has from the start made it very easy to integrate with GitHub. This integration allows you to create a build in TFS/VSTS that fetches the source code from a GitHub repository. I have blogged about this integration before, at http://blog.ehn.nu/2015/06/building-github-repositories-in-tfs-build-vnext/. Publisinh a GitHubRelease from VSTS This integration allows you to use GitHub for source code, but use the powerful build system in TFS/VSTS to run your automated builds. But, when maintaining the project at GitHub you often want to publish your releases there as well, with the output from your build. ...

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! ...