Background

We  upgraded our production TFS 2013.4 server to TFS 2015 RTM this week. As opposed to an in-place upgrade we chose to make a few change on the way; so whilst leaving our DBs on our SQL 2012 cluster

• We moved to a new VM for our AT (to upgrade from Windows 2008R2 to 2012R2)
• Split the SSRS instance off the AT …

In my last post I discussed how you could wire TCM tests into a Release Management vNext pipeline. The problem with the script I provided, as I noted, was that the deployment was triggered synchronously by the build i.e. the build/release process was:

1. TFS Build
   1. Gets the source
   2. Compiled the code
   3. Run the unit tests …

Also see Part 2 on how to address gotcha's in this process

When using Release Management there is a good chance you will want to run test suites as part of your automated deployment pipeline. If you are using a vNext PowerShell based pipeline you need a way to trigger the tests via PowerShell as there is no out the box …

A few days in and I have solved the few problems I have had

Can apply update Security Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3074683)

My system tried to apply the KB3074683 patch a couple of time, rolling it back each time. A search of the forums found the answer to this one. As in the forum post I have an …

I have just done an in place upgrade on my Lenovo W520 from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Something I had not tried during the beta programme, sticking to running Windows 10 in VMs (mostly on Azure).

I have to say the process was pretty smooth. I only hit one issue, and this was the usual NVidia Optimus problems I saw …

If you are using basic PowerShell scripts as opposed to DSC with Release Management there are a few gotcha’s I have found.

You cannot pass parameters

Lets look at a sample script that we would like to run via Release Manager

 1
 2
 3param  
 4(  
 5    $param1   
 6)
 7
 8 
 9
10write-verbose -verbose "Start" …

If you are providing a path to a custom test adaptor such as nUnit or Chutzpah for a TFS/VSO vNext build e.g. $(Build.SourcesDirectory)packages, make sure you have no leading whitespace in the data entry form.

class="image_figure image_internal image_unprocessed" …

I have been using Pester for some PowerShell tests. From the command prompt all is good, but I kept getting the error ‘module cannot be loaded because scripts is disabled on this system’ when I tried to run them via the Visual Studio Test Explorer

class="image_figure …

I have been doing some work on vNext Release Management; I managed to waste a good hour today with a stupid error.

In vNext process templates you provide a username and password to be used as the Powershell remoting credentials (in the red box below)