Posts

This year at the second MVP summit I presented a new solution for hosting a private extension gallery. Since then I have finished up the code and put it up on the CodePlex site so you can use it as you want to. In this blog post I will walk through the background and how you deploy and use the solution. Note: The sourcecode is available at http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com/ as a new 2.0 release. I have branched the original source code so that it is still available. ...

Yesterday, on September 12th, we arranged a Visual Studio Community Day 2013 at Mesh in central Oslo. The agenda was in two parts, first we talked about how you can improve your delivery cadence by using Visual Studio ALM. We went through all stages including planning, developing, testing and deployment. In the second part, we showed some of the new goodies in Visual Studio 2013, where we focused mostly on Git and InRelease which are the two major additions in Visual Studio 2013 ALM. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time to go through everything that we wanted, but we have put up links and some more information on our public GitHub site, at https://github.com/Inmeta/public/wiki/VS2013-Community-Day ...

As you probably already know, Microsoft recently acquired InRelease, a release management product build by InCycle software that integrates tightly with Team Foundation Server. This acquisition fills a huge gap in the Visual Studio ALM suite, letting customers handle the release management and automatic deployment of their solution. This is a crucial feature for enabling Continuous Deployment. In this post I will show you how to get started with using InRelease, by installing it and setting up your first release including automatic deployment to a staging server. I expect to blog some more about InRelease in the near future, looking at the nitty gritty details of release automation and deployment using InRelease. ...

The last couple of months I have been working together with Mathias Olausson, Mattias Sköld and Joachim Rossberg on a new book project for Apress that has just been published. The book is called Pro Team Foundation Service and covers all aspects of working with Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. I have mainly worked on the chapter related to automated build and continuous deployment, but also with some of the other chapters. ...

Extension available at: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/9ed2d30c-a692-42b0-a21d-cdc8d2bf322c I have been playing around a bit lately with extending Team Explorer 2012, mostly because it is fun but also to fix a little nagging feature that should have been there from the beginning. Often I (and a lot of other people) find myself wanting to associate several consecutive changesets to the same work item. The problem is that Team Explorer does not remember this, instead I have to either remember the ID or use a query that hopefully will match the work item. ...

Running Static Code Analysis (SCA) is something that you should be doing regularly to verify your code base against a large set of rules that will check your code for potential problems and how it comply with standard patterns such as naming conventions for example. Microsoft include several different rule sets that you can use for starters, but you can build your own rule sets as well, that contain the rule that you want to use, In addition, you can write your own custom rules and add these to your rule sets. ...

During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Terje Sandstrøm has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores! The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing. You can find it at http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389 The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working. It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites. ...

Updated January 13th 2013: Added note about ASP.NET MVC 4.0 prerequirement Note: The installer and the complete source code is available over at CodePlex at the following location: http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com Extensions and addins are everywhere in the Visual Studio ALM ecosystem! Microsoft releases new cool features in the form of extensions and the list of 3rd party extensions that plug into Visual Studio just keeps growing. One of the nice things about the VSIX extensions is how they are deployed. Microsoft hosts a public Visual Studio Gallery where you can upload extensions and make them available to the rest of the community. Visual Studio checks for updates to the installed extensions when you start Visual Studio, and installing/updating the extensions is fast since it is only a matter of extracting the files within the VSIX package to the local extension folder. ...

TFS 2012 introduces a new type of Lab environment called Standard Environment. This allows you to setup a full Build Deploy Test (BDT) workflow that will build your application, deploy it to your target machine(s) and then run a set of tests on that server to verify the deployment. In TFS 2010, you had to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager and involve half of your IT department to get going. Now all you need is a server (virtual or physical) where you want to deploy and test your application. You don’t even have to install a test agent on the machine, TFS 2012 will do this for you! ...

Yesterday we pushed out a new release (August 2012) of the Community TFS Build Extension, including a new version of the Community TFS Build Manager (1.0.4.6) The two big new features in the Build Manager in this release are: Set Triggers It is now possible to select one or more build definitions and update the triggers for them in one simple operation: \ You’ll note that we have started collapsing the context menu a bit, the list of commands are getting long! 🙂 ...