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. ...
This december we at Active Solution team up with Microsoft Sweden to deliver a full day of Azure and Internet of Things (IoT) goodness in 4 different cities around Sweden: Malmö – Dec 1- Göteborg – Dec 2- Umeå – Dec 8- Stockholm – Dec 9 This is a unique opportunity for devlopers, startups and students that want to learn more about what Microsoft Azure has to offer and how you can implement IoT solutions together with Azure. ...
Today at the Microsoft Connect() event, Microsoft announced the public preview of the brand new version of Visual Studio Release Management. The public preview is available on Visual Studio Team Services (a.k.a. Visual Studio Online, in case you missed that announcement! :-)), and will debut on premise later in 2016. So, what’s this new version about? Let’s summarize some of the major features about it: Web Based The existing version of Visual Studio Release Management, that was originally acquired from InCycle back in 2013, uses a standalone WPF client for authoring, triggering and tracking releases. It always felt a bit awkward and wasn’t really integrated with the rest of TFS. The new version is completely rewritten to be a web based experience and is part of the web access, as a new “Release” tab. ...
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! ...
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. ...
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. ...
I finally got around to upgrading the Inmeta AssociateRecentWorkItems extension to support Visual Studio 2015. Several people have contacted me about this, sorry that it took so long! About the extension This extension makes it easy to associate multiple checkins with the same work items, as it shows a list of the recently associated work items from which you can easily associate one with the current pending changes. ...
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. ...