Did you know TFS was 10 years old this week? I have been working with TFS all that time, doesn’t time fly, and wow has the product changed from TFS 2005 to 2015/VSTS or what. If you want to find out a bit more about the past 10 years try listening to the latest Radio TFS podcast with Brian Harry

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you. We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments …

I came across Net Writer some months ago, when it's creator, Ed Anderson blogged about how he'd taken the newly-released Open Live Writer code and used it in his just-started Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for Windows 10. In January it only supported blogger accounts, which meant that I was unable to use it. …

It has been a while since I have mentioned any had new books on TFS/VSTS, and just like buses a couple come along together. These two, one from Tarun Arora and the other from Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both nicely on trend for the big area of interest for many of the companies I am working with at present; best …

Updated 22 Mar 2016: This task is now available as an extension in the VSTS marketplace A common request I get from clients is how can I create a custom set of release notes for a build? The standard TFS build report often includes the information required (work items and changesets/commits associate with the build) …

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I can share the templates I use in my Resource Template sessions at conferences. It’s taken me a while to find the time, but I have created a repo on GitHub and there is a new Visual Studio solution and deployment project with my code. One very nice feature that this has enabled me …

Azure provides many ways to scale and structure web site and virtual applications. I recently needed to deploy the following structure where each service endpoint was its own Visual Studio Web Application Project built as a MSDeploy Package http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service1 …

**Updated 22 Mar 2016 **This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace If you are using Pester to unit test your PowerShell code then there is a good chance you will want to include it in your automated build process. To do this, you need to get Pester installed on your build machine. The usual options would be Manual …

With the advent of TFS 2015.2 RC (and the associated VSTS release) we have seen the short term removal of the ‘External TFS Build’ option for the Release Management artifacts source. This causes me a bit of a problem as I wanted to try out the new on premises vNext based Release Management features on 2015.2, but don’t …

Brian Harry has done a couple of very interesting posts (post 1 and post 2) on the recent outages of the VSTS service. Whether you use VSTS or not they make interesting reading for anyone who is involved in running SaaS based systems, or anything at scale. From the posts the obvious reading is you cannot under estimate …