Using Lability, DSC and ARM to define and deploy multi-VM environments

Configuration as code crops up a lot in conversation these days. We are searching for that DevOps Nirvana of a single definition of our environment that we can deploy anywhere.

The solution adopted at Black Marble by myself and my colleagues is not …

Pleased to say I'm presenting on DevOps with VSTS at the SharePoint UG in Leeds on the 7th of March

To register have a look at the Usergroup's events site

You never know how people will use a tool once it is out ‘in the wild’. I wrote my Generate Release Notes VSTS extension to generate markdown files, but people have attempted to use it in other ways.

I realised, via an issue raised on Github, that it can also be used, without any code changes, to generate other formats …

I have posted on previously how we used TFS Lab Management to provision our test and development environments. With our move to VSTS, where Lab Management does not exist, we needed to look again at how to provision these labs. There are a few options…

Move to the Cloud – aka stop using Lab Management

Arguably the best …

I have just published Version 1.5 of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in . After much fiddling this VSIX now supports VS2017 as well as VS2013 and VS2015.

The complexity was that VS2017 uses a new VSIX format, V3. You have to makes changes to the project that generates the VSIX and to the VSIX manifest …

Over the Christmas break I migrated our on premises TFS 2015 instance to VSTS. The reason for the migration was multi-fold:

• We were blocked on moving to TFS 2017 as we could not easily upgrade our SQL cluster to SQL 2014
• We wanted to be on the latest, greatest and newest features of VSTS/TFS
• We wanted to get away from …