I m really pleased to say that we at Black Marble are hosting a Yorkshire venue for the upcoming Global DevOps Bootcamp, to quote the main bootcamp site… “Global DevOps Bootcamp is a global event that will be held on Saturday June 17th and is all about DevOps on the Microsoft Stack. Centrally organized by Xpirit and …

I am speaking “Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform” a Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event at Microsoft’s offices in Dublin on the 30th of this month. A bit of a departure for me I will be speaking on Xamarin, makes a change To register see the event site

Pleased to say I'm presenting on DevOps with VSTS at the SharePoint UG in Leeds on the 7th of March To register have a look at the Usergroup's events site

You never know how people will use a tool once it is out ‘in the wild’. I wrote my Generate Release Notes VSTS extension to generate markdown files, but people have attempted to use it in other ways. I realised, via an issue raised on Github, that it can also be used, without any code changes, to generate other formats …

I have posted on previously how we used TFS Lab Management to provision our test and development environments. With our move to VSTS, where Lab Management does not exist, we needed to look again at how to provision these labs. There are a few options… Move to the Cloud – aka stop using Lab Management Arguably the best …

I recorded a podcast on DevOps with Paul Stringfellow @techstringy last weeks Black Marble event. It has just been published on his blog

I have just published Version 1.5 of my Parameters.Xml Generator Visual Studio add-in . After much fiddling this VSIX now supports VS2017 as well as VS2013 and VS2015. The complexity was that VS2017 uses a new VSIX format, V3. You have to makes changes to the project that generates the VSIX and to the VSIX manifest …

I have a VSTS instance that is backed by an Azure Directory. This is a great way to help secure a VSTS instance, only users in the Azure Directory can be added to VSTS, not just any old MSA (LiveIDs). This is a directory that can be shared with any other Azure based services such as O365, and centrally managed and …

I have just released a major update to my Generate Release Notes VSTS Build extension. This V2 update adds support to look back into past releases to find when there was a successful release to a given stage/environment and creates a rollup set of build artifacts, and hence commits/changesets and workitems, in the …

Over the Christmas break I migrated our on premises TFS 2015 instance to VSTS. The reason for the migration was multi-fold: We were blocked on moving to TFS 2017 as we could not easily upgrade our SQL cluster to SQL 2014 We wanted to be on the latest, greatest and newest features of VSTS/TFS We wanted to get away from …