I have just rebuilt my first generation Surface Book from our company standard Windows image. These images are used by all our staff all the time without issue (on Surface and Lenovo devices), so I was not expecting any problems.

I used to rebuild my PC every 6 months or so, but got out the habit when I moved to a …

Whilst writing some training material for VSTS I hit a problem creating a TFVC workspace. I was using VS2017, linking a TFVC Repo to a local folder. I was connecting to the VSTS instance using an MSA.

In Team Explorer, when I came to do a ‘Map & Get’ to map the source locations I got a ‘TF14061: The workspace …

There are still a few spaces left at the Yorkshire Global DevOps BootCamp Venue hosted at Black Marble class="image_figure image_internal image_unprocessed" src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/05/GDBC-3-Twitter_preview-300x150.png"

/> Come and learn about all things …

In the past I have blog on the subject of using advanced unit test mocking tools to ‘mock the unmockable’. It is an interesting question to revisit; how important today are units tests where this form of complex mocking is required?

Of late I have certainly seen a bit of a move towards using more functional style …

Background

I have a VSTS build extension that can apply a VSTS generated build number to Android APK packages. This takes a VSTS build number and generates, and applies, the Version Name (a string) and Version Code (an integer) to the APK file manifest.

The default parameters mean that the behaviour of this task is to …

Today I have released a major new release, V2, of my VSTS Cross Platform Extension to build release notes. This new version is all down to the efforts of Greg Pakes who has completely re-written the task to use newer VSTS APIs.

A minor issue is that this re-write has introduced a couple of breaking changes, as detailed …

The Issue

Azure is a highly resilient service, and VSTS has excellent SLAs. However, a question that is often asked is ‘How do I backup my VSTS instance?’. The simple answer is you don’t. Microsoft handle keeping the instance up, patched and serviceable. Hence, there is no built in means for you to get a local copy of …

I recently, whilst changing a CI/CD release pipeline, updated what was previously a private version of a VSTS extension in the VSTS Marketplace with a version of the VSIX package set to be public.

Note, in my CI/CD process I have a private and public version of each extension (set of tasks), the former is used for …

Whilst trying to install an MSI package we kept getting the errors 2755 and 1632 ‘The Temp folder is on a drive that is full or is inaccessible’.

After much fiddling we found the problem was that the %systemroot%installer folder was missing. Once this was manually re-added the MSIs installed without a problem. The …