The process customisation options in VSTS are now fairly extensive. You can add fields, states and custom items, making VSTS is ‘very possible’ option for many more people.

As well as the obvious uses of this customisation such as storing more data or matching your required process, customisation can also aid in …

Typemock have just released an official VSTS build extension to run Typemock Isolator based tests. Given there is now an official extension I have decided to deprecate mine, it is still available in the Marketplace but I would recommend using the official one 

The new Typemock extension includes two tasks

SmartRunner …

I have been having a look at Docker for Windows recently. I have been experiencing a problem that when I create a new image the created date/time (as shown with docker images) is 8 hours in the past.

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The registration link for Microsoft UK TechDays Online is now live. This is a 5 day event live broadcast from the Microsoft Campus in Reading. You will be able to view the sessions live at https://channel9.msdn.com/

The themes for each day are:

• Monday, 12 September: Explore the world of Data Platform and BOTs
• Tuesday, …

I recently posted on how we were versioning our Nuget packages as part of a release pipeline. In test we noticed that the packages being produced by this process has an extra folder inside them.

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Background

We are currently packaging up a set of UX libraries as NuGet packages to go on our internal NuGet server. The assemblies that make up the core of this framework are all in a single Visual Studio solution, however it makes sense to distribute them as a set of NuGet packages as you might not need all the parts …

Do you have repeating blocks in your VSTS release pipelines?

I certainly do. A common one is to run a set of functional test, so I need to repeatedly …

1. Deploy some test files to a VM
2. Deploy a test agent to the VM – IMPORTANT I had not realised you can only run one test run against this deployed agent. You need to …

I have just released 1.4.7 of the release notes VSTS extension. This provides a new advanced options that allows you to switch the authentication model.

The default remains the same i.e. use a personal access token provided by the server, but you have the option to enable use of the 'defaultcredentials' (via the …

I have been using the Microsoft Band (both version Band1 and Band2) since they came out, and been reasonably happy. However, a year or so on my issues with it have remained the same

• Poor battery life, I can live with charging it each day, but even with GPS Power-saver mode on I can’t go for any exercise over about 4 …