Posts

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. ...

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 ...

Update: The exension is now also available for Visual Studio 2015 Preview: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f5ae0a1d-005f-4a09-a19c-3f46ff30400a GitFlow is a popular workflow that provides a consistent naming convention to your branches as well as clear guidance on how your code should flow through these branches. GitFlow was introduced by Vincent Driessen in this post back in 2010, and quickly caught a lot of attention in the community. Since GitFlow by nature is very prescriptive it made a lot of sense to implement tooling support for the workflow, which Vincent added shortly after. His repo is available at https://github.com/nvie/gitflow, although it hasn’t been updated since 2012. However, several forks has been made, one of the most active is being developed by Peter van der Does at https://github.com/petervanderdoes/gitflow ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...