One announcement I missed at at Connect() last week was that of Visual Studio Dev Essentials. I only heard about this one whilst listening to RadioTFS’s news from Connect() programme. Visual Studio Dev Essentials is mostly a re-packing of all the tools that were already freely available from Microsoft e.g. Visual …

SonarQube released version 5.2 a couple of weeks ago. This enabled some new features that really help if you are working with MSbuild or just on a Windows platform in general. These are detailed in the posts Support for Active Directory and Single Sign On (SSO) in the SonarQube LDAP Plugin Support for Team Foundation …

Announced at Connect() today were a couple of new tools that could really help a team with their DevOps issues when working with VSTS and Azure (and potentially other scenarios too). DevTest Lab is a new set of tooling within the Azure portal that allows the easy management of Test VMs, their creation and management as …

One of the many interesting announcements at Connect() today was that the new Microsoft Chrome Extension for Exploratory Testing is available in the Chrome Store This is a great tool if you use VSO, sorry VSTS, allowing an easy way to ‘kick the tyres’ on your application, logging any bugs directly back to VSTS as Bug …

After Microsoft’s announcements at todays Connect() event, Visual Studio Online (VSO) is now Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It is a good job I never changed the tag on this blog from VSTS when Microsoft dropped the Team System name a few years ago. For a run down of all the VSTS announcements have a look at Brian …

Whilst doing a vNext build from a TFVC repository I needed map both my production code branch and a common folder of scripts that I intended to use in a number of builds, so my build workspace was set to Map – $/BM/mycode/main - my production code Map – $/BM/BuildDefinations/vNextScripts - my shared PowerShell I wish …

This post is an aide memoir so I don’t have to suffer the same annoyance and frustration at what should be an easy task. I’ve now switched to my Surface Pro 3 as my only system, thanks to the lovely new Pro 4 Type Cover and Surface Dock. That meant that I needed the Remote Server Administration Tools installing. Doing …

I have recently added a CI build to my GitHub stored ParametersXmlAddin VSIX project. I did this using Visual Studio Online’s hosted build service, did you know that this could used to build source from GitHub? As part of this build I wanted to version stamp the assemblies and the resultant VSIX package. To do the …

When access VSO you have two authentication options; either a LiveID (or an MSA using it’s newest name) or a Work Account ID (a domain account). The latter is used to provide extra security, so a domain admin can easily control who has access to a whole set of systems. It does assume you have used Azure Active …

At my session at DDDNorth I mentioned that some of the settings you needed to configure in SonarQube 5.1, such as DB connection strings for SonarRunner, would not need to be made once 5.2 was release. Well it was released today. Most important changes for we are Server handles all DB connections LDAP support for user …