Visual Studio Team Services on blog.ehn.nu

Meet Azure DevOps - formerly known as VSTS

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 17:39:27 +0000

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.

A Deep Dive into continuous delivery and Microservices on Azure

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 09:33:54 +0000

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

Deploying ARM Templates using Visual Studio Team Services

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 11:22:34 +0000

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.

New Swedish Meetup Group for Microsoft ALM and DevOps

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 09:59:53 +0000

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.

Using Web Deploy in Visual Studio Team Services Release Management

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 21:40:45 +0000

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.

Talking Visual Studio ALM Extensibility at DevSum16

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 20:54:08 +0000

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.

Publish a GitHub Release from Visual Studio Team Services

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 22:13:43 +0000

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.

Deploy Azure Web Apps with Parameterization

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:12:05 +0000

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.

Downloading Build Artifacts in TFS Build vNext

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 19:14:31 +0000

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.

New Book – Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 20:12:35 +0000

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!

Performance Tests for Azure Web Apps

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 14:19:52 +0000

Anyone that has been involved with setting up the infrastructure that is needed to perform on premise load testing of a realistic number of users knows how much work that is to both setup and to maintain. With Visual Studio Ultimate/Enterprise you needed to create a test rig by creating multiple machines and then installing a test controller and test agents on all the machines and configure them to talk to each other.

10 Features in Team Foundation Server that you maybe didn’t know about

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 17:37:23 +0000

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.

Generate custom build numbers in TFS Build vNext

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 23:15:12 +0000

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.

Building GitHub repositories in TFS Build vNext

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 12:53:08 +0000

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.

Deploying an Azure Web Site using TFS Build vNext

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 21:58:32 +0000

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.

Speaking at DevSum 2015

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 09:18:44 +0000

This year I’ll be presenting at DevSum, which is the largest .NET conference in Sweden. I’ll be talking about Visual Studio Online, Microsoft cloud offering for your development projects. I will go through all the major features of VSO, such as source code hosting, agile planning tooling , automated builds, test management and integration with other 3rd party service such as Trello and AppVeyor. I will also talk about how you can migrate your existing projects to VSO

Trigger Releases in Visual Studio Release Management

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:22:04 +0000

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.

TFS Build vNext – A Preview

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:00:35 +0000

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!

Trigger Visual Studio Release Management vNext from TeamCity

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:56:58 +0000

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.

Using Log4Net for Application Insights

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 21:08:14 +0000

Getting started with Application Insights (AI) in a new or existing application is very easy. From Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 it is even integrated right into the New Web Project dialog:

When you select this option, Visual Studio will automatically create a new instrumentation key for you that identifies the web application, and insert the necessary Javascript into your master layout page that takes care of sending usage information to Application Insights. Try running your application, click around a few times, and you will see information showing up in the Azure portal within, literally, a few seconds.