New Swedish Meetup Group for Microsoft ALM and DevOps

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.

First meetup: Microsoft Team Services Agile Transformation Story + VS ALM Update

The first meeting is set to October 25th, where we will have Jose Rady Allende, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team Services tean, join us online to talk about the Microsoft Team Service Agile Transformation story.
We’ll also going to have a few lightning talks where we will talk about recent new additions to the TFS/VSTS platform

Meeting link:

http://www.meetup.com/swedish-ms-alm-devops/events/234449734/

There are already around 25 people that have signed up for it, so sign up before it gets full!

Heop to see you there!

Image result for donovan brown devops

TFS 2015 Update 2 RC1 Available – With VS Release Management vNext

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!

And of course, if you want to learn (a lot) more about hwo to implement continuous delivery using TFS 2015, with the new build and release management features, grab a copy of our latest book on the topic, Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015:

Deploy Azure Web Apps with Parameterization

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.

As I have mentioned a gazillion times, building your binaries once and only once is a key principle when implementing continuous delivery. If you are using web deploy for deploying web applications (and you should), you must then use Web Deploy parameters to apply the correct configuration values at deployment time.

Under the hood the Azure Web App Deployment task uses the Publish-AzureWebsiteProject cmdlet that uses web deploy to publish a web deploy package to Microsoft Azure. Up until recently, this cmdlet did not support web deploy parameters, the only thing that you could substitute was the connecting string, like so:

Publish-AzureWebsiteProject -Name site1 -Package package.zip -ConnectionString @{ DefaultConnection = "my connection string" }

However, it is actually possible to specify the path to the SetParameter.xml file that is generated together with the web deploy package. To do this, you can use the –SetParametersFile parameter, like so:

Publish-AzureWebsiteProject -Name Site1 -Package package.zip -SetParametersFile package.SetParameters.xml

When using the Azure Web App Deployment task, there is no separate parameter for this but you can use the Additional Arguments parameter to pass this information in:

Note: In this case, I am using the Azure Web App Deployment task as part of a release definition in Visual Studio Release Management, but you can also use it in a regular build definition.

This will apply the parameter values defined in the QBox.Web.SetParameters.xml file when deploying the package to the Azure Web App.

If you are interested, here is the pull request that implemented support for SetParameters files: https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/pull/316

Downloading Build Artifacts in TFS Build vNext

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.

However, sometimes you might not have the opportunity to setup a release management tool like VSTS or Octopus Deploy, but you still want to be able to build your binaries once and deploy them. Well, you can still implement your deployment using TFS Build, but instead of building your source code during every build we download the artifacts from another build that already has completed.

Let’s look at how we can implement this using PowerShell and the REST API in TFS/VSTS.In this sample we will execute this script as part of a TFS build, in order to create a “poor mans” deployment pipeline. If you want to use the script outside of TFS Build, you need to replace some environment variables that are used in the script below.

Downloading Build Artifacts using PowerShell and the REST API

First of all, to learn about the REST API and other ways to integrate and extend Visual Studio, TFS and Visual Studio Team Services, take a look at https://www.visualstudio.com/integrate. This is a great landing page that aggregate a lot of information about extensibility.

Here is a PowerShell script that implements this functionality, as well as a few other things that is handy if you implement a deployment pipeline from a build definition.

[CmdletBinding()]

param(
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
    [string]$buildDefinitionName,
    [Parameter()]
    [string]$artifactDestinationFolder = $Env:BUILD_STAGINGDIRECTORY,
    [Parameter()]
    [switch]$appendBuildNumberVersion = $false
)
    Write-Verbose -Verbose ('buildDefinitionName: ' + $buildDefinitionName)
    Write-Verbose -Verbose ('artifactDestinationFolder: ' + $artifactDestinationFolder)
    Write-Verbose -Verbose ('appendBuildNumberVersion: ' + $appendBuildNumberVersion)

    $tfsUrl = $Env:SYSTEM_TEAMFOUNDATIONCOLLECTIONURI + $Env:SYSTEM_TEAMPROJECT

    $buildDefinitions = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri ($tfsURL + '/_apis/build/definitions?api-version=2.0&name=' + $buildDefinitionName) -Method GET -UseDefaultCredentials
    $buildDefinitionId = ($buildDefinitions.value).id;
    
    $tfsGetLatestCompletedBuildUrl = $tfsUrl + '/_apis/build/builds?definitions=' + $buildDefinitionId + '&statusFilter=completed&resultFilter=succeeded&$top=1&api-version=2.0'

    $builds = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $tfsGetLatestCompletedBuildUrl -Method GET -UseDefaultCredentials
    $buildId = ($builds.value).id;

    if( $appendBuildNumberVersion)
    {
        $buildNumber = ($builds.value).buildNumber
        $versionRegex = "d+.d+.d+.d+"

        # Get and validate the version data
        $versionData = [regex]::matches($buildNumber,$versionRegex)
        switch($versionData.Count)
        {
           0        
              { 
                 Write-Error "Could not find version number data in $buildNumber."
                 exit 1
              }
           1 {}
           default 
              { 
                 Write-Warning "Found more than instance of version data in buildNumber." 
                 Write-Warning "Will assume first instance is version."
              }
        }
        $buildVersionNumber = $versionData[0]
        $newBuildNumber =  $Env:BUILD_BUILDNUMBER + $buildVersionNumber
        Write-Verbose -Verbose "Version: $newBuildNumber"
        Write-Verbose -Verbose "##vso[build.updatebuildnumber]$newBuildNumber"
    }

    $dropArchiveDestination = Join-path $artifactDestinationFolder "drop.zip"


    #build URI for buildNr
    $buildArtifactsURI = $tfsURL + '/_apis/build/builds/' + $buildId + '/artifacts?api-version=2.0'
    
    #get artifact downloadPath
    $artifactURI = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $buildArtifactsURI -Method GET -UseDefaultCredentials).Value.Resource.downloadUrl

    #download ZIP
    Invoke-WebRequest -uri $artifactURI -OutFile $dropArchiveDestination -UseDefaultCredentials 

    #unzip
    Add-Type -assembly 'system.io.compression.filesystem'
    [io.compression.zipfile]::ExtractToDirectory($dropArchiveDestination, $artifactDestinationFolder)

    Write-Verbose -Verbose ('Build artifacts extracted into ' + $Env:BUILD_STAGINGDIRECTORY)

This script accepts three parameters:

buildDefinitionName
This is a mandatory parameter where you can specify the name of the build definition from which you want to download the artifacts from. This script assumes that the build definition is located in the same team project as the build definition in which this script is running. If this is not the case, you need to add a parameter for the team project.

artifactsDestinationFolder
This is an optional parameter that let’s you specify the folder where the artifacts should be downloaded to. If you leave it empty, it will be downloaded to the staging directory of the build (BUILD_STAGINGDIRECTORY)

appendBuildNumberVersion
A switch that indicates if you want to append the version number of the linked build to the build number of the running build. Since you are actually releasing the build version that you are downloading artifacts from, it often makes sense to use this version number for the deployment build. The script will extract a 4 digit version (x.x.x.x) from the build number and then append it to the build number of the running build.

As an example, if the latest release build has the build number MyApplication-1.2.3.4, the build will extract 1.2.3.4 and append this to the end of the build number of the running build.

Running the script in TFS Build

Running a PowerShell script in TFS Build is really easy, but I’ll include it here anyway. Typically you will run this script in the beginning of a build in order to get the build artifacts, and then add the tasks related to deploying the artifacts in whatever way that fits.

Add the script to source control and then add a PowerShell task to the build definition and select the script from the repository. Then specify the parameters of the tasks in the argument field

Here is a sample argument:

-buildDefinitionName MyApplication.Release –appendBuildNumberVersion

Where MyApplication.Release is the name of the build definition that have produced the build artifacts that we want to release.

Running this script as part of the build will not download the artifacts from the latest successful build of the linked build definition and place them in the staging directory. In addition it will append the version number of the linked build (x.x.x.x) to the end of the running build.

NB: You need to consider where to place this script. Often you’ll want to put this script together with the application that you are deploying, so that they can change and version together.

Hope you will find this script useful, le me know if you have any issues with it!

Happy building!

PS: If you want to learn more about implementing Continuous Delivery using Visual Studio Team Services and TFS, grab a copy of my and Mathias Olausson’s latest book “Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015”

New Book – Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015

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!

About the book

The book is titled Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015 and is aiming to be a more practical complement to Jez Humble’s seminal Continous Delivery book with a heavy focus of course on how to implement these processes using the Visual Studio ALM platform.

The book discusses the principles and practices around continuous delivery and continuous deployment, including release planning, source control management, build and test automation and deployment pipelines. The book uses a fictive sample application that we use throughout the book as a concrete example on how to go about to implement a continuous delivery workflow on a real application.

We hope that you will find this book useful and valuable!

Abstract

This book is the authoritative source on implementing Continuous Delivery practices using Microsoft’s Visual Studio and TFS 2015. Microsoft MVP authors Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn translate the theory behind this methodology and show step by step how to implement Continuous Delivery in a real world environment.

Building good software is challenging. Building high-quality software on a tight schedule can be close to impossible. Continuous Delivery is an agile and iterative technique that enables developers to deliver solid, working software in every iteration. Continuous delivery practices help IT organizations reduce risk and potentially become as nimble, agile, and innovative as startups.

In this book, you’ll learn:

What Continuous Delivery is and how to use it to create better software more efficiently using Visual Studio 2015
How to use Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online to plan, design, and implement powerful and reliable deployment pipelines
Detailed step-by-step instructions for implementing Continuous Delivery on a real project

Table of Content

Chapter 1: Introduction to Continuous Delivery
Chapter 2: Overview of Visual Studio 2015 ALM
Chapter 3: Designing an Application for Continuous Delivery
Chapter 4: Managing the Release Process
Chapter 5: Source Control Management
Chapter 6: PowerShell for Deployment
Chapter 7: Build Automation
Chapter 8: Managing Code Quality
Chapter 9: Continuous Testing
Chapter 10: Building a Deployment Pipeline
Chapter 11: Measure and Learn

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

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.

1. Associate Work Items in Git commits from any client

Associating work items to your changesets in TFS have always been one of the more powerful features. Not in itself, but in the traceability that this gives us.
Without this, we would have to rely on check-in comments from the developers to understand the reason for a particular change, not always easy when you look at changes that were done a few years back!

When using Git repos in TFS, and you use the Git integration in Visual Studio you have the same functionality that lets you associate a work item to a commit, either by using a work item query or by specifying a work item ID.

But a lot of developers like to use other Git tooling, such as Git Extensions, SourceTree or the command line. And then we have the teams that work on other platforms, perhaps developing iOS apps but store their source code in a Git repo in TFS. They obviously can’t use Visual Studio for committing their changes to TFS.

To associate a commit with a work item in these scenarios, you can simply enter the ID of the work item with a # in front of it as part of the commit message:

git commit –a –m “Optimized query processing #4321”

Here we associate this commit with the work item with ID 4321. Note that since Git commits are local, the association won’t actually be done until the commit has been pushed to the server. TFS processes git commits for work item association asynchronously, so it could potentially take a short moment before the association is done.

2. Batch update work items from the Web Access

Excel has always been a great tool for updating multiple work items in TFS. But over the years the web access in TFS has become so much better so that most people do all their work related to work item management there. And unfortunately, it is not possible to export work item queries to Excel as easily from the web as it is from Visual Studio.

But, we can update multiple work items in TFS web access as well. These features have gradually been added to Visual Studio Online and is now part of TFS 2015 as well.

From the product backlog view, we can select multiple work items and the perform different operations on them, as shown below:

There are a few shortcut operations for very common tasks such as moving multiple backlog items to a iteration, or assigning them to a team member.
But then you have the Edit selected work item(s) that allows us to set any fields to a new value in one operation.

You can also do this from the sprint backlog and from the result list of a work item query.

3. Edit and commit source files in your web browser

Working with source code is of course done best from a development IDE such as Visual Studio. But sometimes it can be very convenient to change a file straight from the web access, and you can! Maybe you find a configuration error when logged on a staging environment where you do not have access to Visual Studio. Then you can just browse to the file in source control and change it using the Edit button:

After making the changes, you can add a meaning commit message and commit the change back to TFS. When using Git, you can even commit it to a new branch.

4. Bring in your stakeholders to the team using the free Stakeholder license

Normally, every team member that accesses TFS and reads or writes information to it (source code, work items etc) need to have a Client Access License (CAL). For the development team this is usually not a problem, often they already have a Visual Studio with MSDN subscription in which a TFS CAL is included. What often cause some friction is when the team try to involve the stakeholders. Stakeholders often include people who just want to track progress or file a bug or a suggestion occasionally. Buying a CAl for every person in this role usually ends up being way to expensive and not really worth it.

In TFS 2013 Update 4 this was changed, from that point people with a stakeholder license does not a CAL at all, they can access TFS for free. Buth they still have a limited experience, they can’t do everything that a normal team member can. Features that a stakeholder can use include:

Full read/write/create on all work items
Create, run and save (to “My Queries”) work item queries
View project and team home pages
Access to the backlog, including add and update (but no ability to reprioritize the work)
Ability to receive work item alerts

To learn more about the Stakeholder license, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/Library/vs/alm/work/connect/work-as-a-stakeholder

5. Protect your Git branches using branch policies

When using Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) we have from the first version of TFS had the ability to use check-in policies for enforcing standards and policies of everything that is checked in to source control. We also have the ability to use Gated Builds, which allows us to make sure that a changeset is not checked in unless an associated build definition is executed successfully.

When Git was added to TFS back in 2013, there was no corresponding functionality available. But in TFS 2015 now, the team has added branch policies as a way to protect our branches from inadvertent or low quality commits. In the version control tab of the settings administration page you can select a branch from a Git repo and then apply branch policies. The image below shows the available branch policies.

Here we have enabled all three policies, which will enforce the following:

All commits in the master branch must be made using a pull request
The commits in the pull request must have associated work items
The pull request must be reviewed by at least two separate reviewers
The QBox.CI build must complete successfully before the pull request can be merged to the master branch

I really recommend that you start using these branch policies, they are an excellent way to enforce the standard and quality of the commits being made, and can help your team improve their process and help move towards being able to deliver value to your customers more frequently.

6. Using the @CurrentIteration in Work Item Queries

Work Item Queries are very useful for retrieving the status of your ongoing projects. The backlogs and boards are great in TFS for managing the sprints and requirements, but the ability to query on information across one ore more projects are pivotal. Work item queries are often used as reports and we can also create charts from them.

Very often, we are interested in information in the current sprint, for example how many open bug are there, how many requirements do we have that doesn’t have associated test cases and so on. Before TFS 2015, we had to write work item queries that referenced the current sprint directly, like so:

The problem with this was of course that as soon as the sprint ended and the next one started, we hade to update all these queries to reference the new iteration. Some people came up with smart work arounds, but it was still cumbersome.

Enter the @CurrentIteration token. This token will evaluate to the currently sprint which means we can define our queries once and they will continue to work for all upcoming sprints as well.

this token is unfortunately not yet available in Excel since it is not team-aware. Since iterations are configured per team, it is necessary to evaluate this token in the context of a team. Both the web access and Visual Studio have this context, but the Excel integration does not, yet.

Learn more about querying using this token at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Work/track/query-by-date-or-current-iteration

7. Pin Important Information to the home page

The new homepage has been available since TFS 2012, and I still find that most teams does not use the possibility to pin important information to the homepage enough.
The homepage is perfect to show on a big screen in your team room, at least if you show relevant information on it.

We can pin the following items to the home page:

Work Item Queries
The tile will show the number of work items returned by the query . Focus on pinning queries where the these numbers are important and can trigger some activity. E.g. not the total number of backlog items, but for example the number of active bugs.
Build Definition
This tile shows a bar graph with the history of the last 30 builds. Gives a good visualization of how stable the builds are, if you see that builds fails every now and then you have a problem that needs to be investigated.
Source control
Shows the number of recent commits or changesets. Will let you know how much activity that is going on in the different repos
Charts
Charts can be created from work item queries and can also be pinned to the home page. Very useful for quickly give an overview of the status for a particular area

Here is an example where we have added a few items of each type

8. Query on Work Item Tags

Support for tagging was first implemented back in TFS 2012 Update 2. This allowed us to add multiple tags to work items and then filter backlogs and query results on these tags.
There was however a big thing missing and that was the ability to search for work items using tags.

This has been fixed since TFS 2013 Update 2, which means we can now create queries like this.

It is also possible to work with tags using Excel, this was another big thing missing from the start.

Unfortunately it is not yet possible to setup alerts on tags, you can vote on this feature on UserVoice here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/6059328-use-tags-in-alerts

9. Select how you want to handle bugs

One of the most common questions I get when talking to teams that use TFS is how they should handle bugs. Some teams want to have the bugs on the backlog and treat them like requirements. Other teams want to treat them more like tasks, that is adding them to the corresponding user story or backlog item and use the task board to keep track of the bug.

The good think is that you can configure this per team now. On the team settings page, there is a section that lets you configure the behavior of bugs.

To learn more about controlling the behavior of bugs, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/Library/vs/alm/work/customize/show-bugs-on-backlog

10. Integrate with external or internal services using Service Hooks

Extensibility and integration are very important to Microsoft these days, and this is very clear when looking at the investments for TFS 2015 that included a bunch of work in this area. First of all Microsoft has added a proper REST API for accessing and updating most of the available artifacts in TFS, such as work items and builds. It uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication, which means it is based on open modern web standards and can be used from any client on any platform.

In addition to this, TFS 2015 also support Service Hooks. A service hook is basically a web endpoint that can be called when something happens, in this case in TFS. So for example, when a backlog item is created in TFS we might want to also create a card in Trello. Or when a new change is committed into source control, we might want to kick off a Jenkins build.

Here is a list of the services that are supported out of the box in TFS 2015:

And the list keeps growing, in Visual Studio Online there are already 7 more services offered, including AppVeyor, Bamboo and MyGet.

Note that the list contains one entry called Web Hooks. This is a general service configuration in which you can configure a HTTP POST endpoint that will receive messages for the events that you configure. The messages can be sent using JSON, MarkDown, HTML or text. This mean that you can also integrate with internal services, if they expose HTTP REST endpoints.

To learn more about service hooks, see https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/integrate/get-started/service-hooks/create-subscription

Generate custom build numbers in TFS Build vNext

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.

Build Number Format

There are (of course) still some things that are not completely obvious how to do. One of these things is how to generate a custom build number for a build. Every build definition has a build number format field where you can use some macros to dictate what the resulting build number should look like.

The build number format can contain a mix of text and macros, in the above example I have used some of the date macros to generate a build number that uses todays date plus an increment at the end.

Generating a custom build number

Sometimes though you will have the requirement to generate a completely custom build number, based on some external criteria that is not available using these macros.

This can be done, but as I mentioned before, it is not obvious! TFS Build contains a set of logging commands that can be used to generate output from a task /typically a script) that is generated in a way so that TFS Build will interpret this as a command and perform the corresponding action. Let’s look at some examples:

##vso[task.logissue type=error;sourcepath=someproject/controller.cs;linenumber=165;columnumber=14;code=150;]some error text here

This logging command can be used to log an error or a warning that will be added to the timeline of the current task. To generate this command, you can for exampleuse the following ‘PowerShell script:

Write-Verbose –Verbose “##vso[task.logissue type=error;sourcepath=someproject/controller.cs;linenumber=165;columnumber=14;code=150;]some error text here”

As you can see, there is a special format that is used for these commands: ##vso[command parameters]text. This format allows the build agent to pick up this command and process it.

Now, to generate a build number, we can use the task.setvariable command and set the build number, like so:

##vso[task.setvariable variable=build.buildnumber;]1.2.3.4

This will change the build number of the current build to 1.2.3.4. Of course, you would typically generate this value from some other source combined with some logic to end up with a unique build number.

You can find the full list of logging commands at https://github.com/Microsoft/vso-agent-tasks/blob/master/docs/authoring/commands.md

Building GitHub repositories in TFS Build vNext

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.

Let’s see how this work:

First, you’ll need a GitHub repo of course.
Note: If you haven’t checked out the GitHub for VisualStudio extension yet, try it out. Makes it easy to clone your existing repos as well as creating new
ones, right inside Visual Studio.

Clone existing repos Create a new GitHub repo
Here, I create a FabrikamFiberTFS repo on GitHub where I’ll upload the code to
Now, to enable the TFS Build vNext integration, you need to create a Personal Access Token in GitHub. To do this, click the Settings link below your profile image in
GitHub, and then click on the Personal Access Token link:
Give the access token a name that you will remember(!), and then give it these permissions:

NOTE: In order to configure triggering CI builds, you must have admin permissions on the GitHub repo.
Save it, and the copy the access token that is displayed.
NOTE: Store this token somewhere safely, you will not be able to view it again. You probably want to setup a personal access token that works
for all your GitHub repos, if so you need to remember this access token.
Now, create a new build definition in your Visual Studio Online/TFS team project. Head over to the Repository tab, and select GitHub as your repository tab:
Paste your token in the Access Token field. This will populate the Repository drop down and let you select amongst your existing GitHub repositories:

You will also be able to select which branch that should be the default branch.
To enable continuous integration for your build definition, go to the Trigger tab and check the Continuous Integration checkbox. When saved, this build
definition will now use the repo_hook permission against your GitHub repository to respond to commit events.
Save you build definition, and commit a change to your GitHub repository. A new build should be queued almost immediately.
When the build completes, you will see the associated commit as usual in the build summary. However, this commit link now points to the GitHub commit page instead:

Clicking the link shows the commit in GitHub:
To round this up, we will add a Build Badge to our Welcome page to get an indication of the current status of the build. Go to the General tab, check
the Badge enabled checkbox and save the build definition. This will expose a link that shows you the public URL to a dynamically generated icon that
shows the status of the latest build for this particular build definition:
Go to the home page and then to the Welcome page tab. If you haven’t created a welcome page yet, do so. Then add the following markdown to the page:
# FabrikamFiberTFS Build Status
![](URL_FROM_BUILD_BADGE_LINK)

In my case, the link looks like this:

# FabrikamFiberTFS Build Status
![](https://jakob.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_apis/public/build/definitions/488c3645-8921-4753-af50-4a9569fc2d27/116/badge)
Save it and you will see a nice little badge showing the status of the latest build:

Deploying an Azure Web Site using TFS Build vNext

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.

Sample Application

For this blog post I will use the common FabrikamFiber sample application, the full source for this is available at https://fabrikam.codeplex.com/

I have created a new team project called FabrikamFiber on my local TFS 2015 instance, and pushed the source to the default Git repo in this team project:

So, let’s see how we can build, test and deploy this application to Azure.

Register your Azure subscription in TFS

First of all, you need to add your Azure Subscription to TFS. You only need to this once of course (or at least one per subscription in case you have several).

This is done on the collection level, by using the Services tab:

Click the Add new Azure Subscription link on the top left. Now you need to enter the Subscription Id and the subscription certificate (you can use credential as well, but using the certificate option is more secure).
To get this information, follow these steps:

Open a Windows PowerShell windows in administrative mode
Type Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile
This will open a web browser and automatically download your subscription file
Open the subscription file (named <SubscriptionName>-<Date>-credentials.publishsettings
In this file, locate the Subscription Id and the ManagementCertificate fields

Now, copy these values into the Add Azure Subscription dialog:

Press OK. After it is saved, you should see your subscription to the left and some general information:

That’s it, now we can crate a build definition for our application.

Create a Build Definition

Go to the team project where the source is located and click on the Build Preview tab. Click on the + button to create a new vNext definition:
Now you can select a definition template for your build definition. Go to the Deployment tab and select the Azure Website template:

This will create a build definition with three steps, one for build the solution, one for running all the tests and one for deploying a web site to Azure.
Note: For this post, I disabled the test step since not all tests pass in the default FabrikamFiber solution.

If you take a look at the Visual Studio Build step, you can see the arguments that are passed to MSBuild

/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:PackageAsSingleFile=true /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:PackageLocation=”$(build.stagingDirectory)”

These are standard MSBuild parameters for triggering and configuration web deploy during compilation. These specific settings will create a web deploy package and put it in the staging directory of the build definition.

Now, over to the deployment step. Here you can see that you can select your Azure subscription that we registered before. In addition we give the web site a unique name, this name is what the public web site will be called,in this case
it will be http://fabrikamfibervnext.azurewebsites.net. We also need to specify the Web Site Location for this web site.

The final parameter that we need to specify is the Package. By default it will fetch all zip files located in the staging directory. I want to deploy the FabrikamFiber.Web application, so I change this to $(build.stagingDirectory)FabrikamFiber.Web.zip.

That’s it! Save the build definition and queue a new build.After it has completed, you should see a log that looks something like this and you should have a web sites published in Azure.
As you can see, all steps in the process are shown to the left and you can easily see the output from each step.

Deploying Multiple Web Sites

If you’re familiar with the FabrikamFiber sample solution, you know that it actually has two web applications in the same solution, FabrikamFiber.Web and Fabrikamfiber.Extranet.Web.

So, how do we go about to deploy both web sites as part of our build? Well, it couldn’t be easier really, just add a new Azure Web Site Deployment build step and reference the other web deploy package:

This will now first build the solution and then publish both web sites to Azure.

Summary

Now you have seen how easy it is to build and deploy web applications using TFS Build vNext.

Trigger Releases in Visual Studio Release Management

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.

Then, with the update train of Visual Studio 2013, new functionality such as vNext deployments, support for Powershell DSC etc was added. Together with this a new REST API was introduced that removes the need for a command line application to trigger a release. However, this REST API _only_ works for vNext deployments, and it will most likely never be implemented for agent based deployments. Basically all new functionality in the release management area only works for vNext deployements, so you should be looking to move in that direction.

Also, in VS 2013 Update 4 support was added for connecting to the Release Management service running in Visual Studio Online. With this option, another way of triggering release was added, in which the Release Management service listens for build completion events in TFS which will kick off a release. It is still possible to use the API however, in cases where you don’t run TFS Build.

So, since this is rather confusing at the moment and causes a lot of questions, I decided to summarize the currently available combinations and the options that you have when it comes to triggering a release in VSRM:

Source	Release Management	Deployment Type	Options
VSO Build	VSO	vNext	Automatically (through build completed event)
VSO Build	VSO	Agent-Based	N/A
TFS Build	On-Premise (Update 3)	vNext	REST API
TFS Build	On-Premise (Update 3)	Agent-Based	ReleaseBuildTemplate
3^rd party/share	VSO	vNext	REST API
3^rd party/share	VSO	Agent-Based	N/A
3^rd party/share	On-Premise (Update 3)	vNext	REST API
3^rd party/share	On-Premise (Update 3)	Agent-Based	ReleaseManagementBuild.exe

Note that some of these combinations are not supported at the moment, those are marked with N/A.

Hope that helps