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 …

Introduction

A while ago I create the TFSAlertsDSL project to provide a means to script responses to TFS Alert SOAP messages using Python. The SOAP Alert technology has been overtaken by time with the move to Service Hooks.

So I have taken the time to move this project over to the newer technology, which is supported …

If you are moving from on-premises TFS to VSTS you might hit the same problem I have just have. The structure of a VSTS releases is changing, there is now the concept of multiple ‘Deployment Steps’ in an environment. This means you can use a number of different agents for a single environment – a good thing.

The …