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)

I will be speaking at Leeds DevOps on the 21st of July on the subject of Desired State Configuration (DSC).

‘In the Windows world, due to its API based architecture, deployment is too often not as simple as copying an EXE and updating a text configuration file. Desired State Configuration is an attempt to ease the pain …

Update 21 Aug 2015 - This post contains all the basic information, but there is an improved PowerShell script discussed in Using Release Management vNext templates when you don’t want to use DSC scripts – A better script

Many web sites are basically forms over data, so you need to deploy some DB schema and something …

Whilst setting up Application Insights on one of our web sites I hit a problem. The target site appeared to be working OK, but if I setup a ping test it failed.

Digging into the failure, as with much of Application Insights just keep clicking to go deeper, I found the issue was that a CSS file was failing to load.