Rfennells

Using VSTS Gates to help improve my deployment pipeline of VSTS Extensions to the Visual Studio Marketplace
Richard Fennell Mar 20, 2018 · 5 min read · Release Management Release Management Tech Tips VSTS VSTS ·
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My existing VSTS CI/CD process has a problem that the deployment of a VSTS extension, from the moment it is uploaded to when it’s tasks are available to a build agent, is not instantiation. The process can potentially take a few minutes to roll out. The problem this delay causes is a perfect candidate for using VSTS …
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Fixing a ‘git-lfs filter-process: gif-lfs: command not found’ error in Visual Studio 2017
Richard Fennell Mar 9, 2018 · 3 min read · Git Git Tech Tips ·
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I am currently looking at the best way to migrate a large legacy codebase from TFVC to Git. There are a number of ways I could do this, as I have posted about before. Obviously, I have ruled out anything that tries to migrate history as ‘that way hell lies’; if people need to see history they will be able to look at …
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Building private VSTS build agents using the Microsoft Packer based agent image creation model
Richard Fennell Feb 27, 2018 · 5 min read · DevOps DevOps Tech Tips VSTS VSTS ·
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Background
Having automated builds is essential to any good development process. Irrespective of the build engine in use, VSTS, Jenkins etc. you need to have a means to create the VMs that are running the builds.
You can of course do this by hand, but in many ways you are just extending the old ‘it works on my PC – the …

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Yorkshire Venue for the Global DevOps BootCamp 2018
Richard Fennell Feb 22, 2018 · 1 min read · DevOps DevOps ·
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I am really pleased that we at Black Marble are again the first UK location announcing that we are hosting an event on June 16th as part of the 2018 Global DevOps BootCamp. As the event’s site says…
“The Global DevOps Bootcamp takes place once a year on venues all over the world. The more people joining in, the better …

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New release of my Generate Parameters.xml tools to add support for app.config files
Richard Fennell Feb 13, 2018 · 2 min read · DevOps DevOps Release Management Release Management ·
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I recently released an updated version of my Generate Parameters.XML tool for Visual Studio. This release adds support for generating parameters.xml files from app.config files as well as web.config files Why you might ask why add support for app.config files when the parameters.xml model is only part of WebDeploy? …
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Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline with Semantic Versioning
Richard Fennell Feb 3, 2018 · 2 min read · DevOps DevOps Tech Tips VSTS VSTS ·
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I wrote a post recently Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline. I realised since writing it that it does not address the issue of if you wish to version your ARM Templates using Semantic Versioning. My JSON versioning task I used did not support the option of not extracting a numeric version number …
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What I wish I had known when I started developing Lability DevTest Lab Environments
Richard Fennell Jan 31, 2018 · 3 min read · DevTest Labs DevTest Labs DSC DSC Powershell Powershell ·
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At Black Marble we have been migrating our DevTest labs to from on-premises TFS Lab Management to a mixture of on-premise and Azure hosted Lability defined Labs as discussed by Rik Hepworth on his blog. I have only been tangentially involved in this effort until recently, consuming the labs but not creating the …
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Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline
Richard Fennell Jan 22, 2018 · 1 min read · Azure Azure DevOps DevOps ·
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Updated 3 Feb 2018 - Also see Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline with Semantic Versioning Azure Resource Templates (ARM) allow your DevOps infrastructure deployments to be treated as ‘content as code’. So infrastructure definitions can be stored in source control. As with any code it is really …
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Creating test data for my Generate Release Notes Extension for use in CI/CD process
Richard Fennell Jan 19, 2018 · 2 min read · DevOps DevOps Git Git Powershell Powershell Release Management Release Management Tech Tips VSTS VSTS ·
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As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful …
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How I fixed my problem that my VSTS Build Extension was too big to upload to the Marketplace
Richard Fennell Jan 5, 2018 · 2 min read · DevOps DevOps Tech Tips VSTS VSTS ·
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Whist adding a couple of new tasks to my VSTS Manifest Versioning Extension I hit the problem that VSIX package became too big to upload to the Marketplace. The error I saw in my CI/CD VSTS pipeline was``` ##vso[task.logissue type=error;]error: Failed Request: Bad Request(400) - The extension package size '23255292 …
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Background