Great day at DDDNorth yesterday, hope everyone enjoyed it. Thanks to all the team who helped during the preparation and on the day. The slides from Rik Hepworth and my presentation on ‘_Living the dream - Real world DevOps with Azure and VSTS’ are up at Github. _ We were a late stand in session to cover for a presenter …

The video of my session at TechDays online is now available on Channel9, along with all the TechDay Online UK content Enjoy…

Updated 27 Sep 2016: Added solutions to known issues Background As I have posted many times we make use of TFS Lab Management to provide network isolated dev/test environments. Going forward I see us moving to Azure Dev Labs and/or Azure Stack with ARM templates, but that isn’t going to help me today, especially when I …

The process customisation options in VSTS are now fairly extensive. You can add fields, states and custom items, making VSTS is ‘very possible’ option for many more people. As well as the obvious uses of this customisation such as storing more data or matching your required process, customisation can also aid in …

Typemock have just released an official VSTS build extension to run Typemock Isolator based tests. Given there is now an official extension I have decided to deprecate mine, it is still available in the Marketplace but I would recommend using the official one The new Typemock extension includes two tasks SmartRunner …

I have been having a look at Docker for Windows recently. I have been experiencing a problem that when I create a new image the created date/time (as shown with docker images) is 8 hours in the past. Turns out the problem seems to be due to putting my Windows 10 laptop into sleep mode. So the process to see the problem …

The registration link for Microsoft UK TechDays Online is now live. This is a 5 day event live broadcast from the Microsoft Campus in Reading. You will be able to view the sessions live at https://channel9.msdn.com/ The themes for each day are: Monday, 12 September: Explore the world of Data Platform and BOTs Tuesday, …

I recently posted on how we were versioning our Nuget packages as part of a release pipeline. In test we noticed that the packages being produced by this process has an extra folder inside them. We expected there to be a netcore50 folder, but not a .NETCore50 folder. Strangely if we build the package locally we only …

Background We are currently packaging up a set of UX libraries as NuGet packages to go on our internal NuGet server. The assemblies that make up the core of this framework are all in a single Visual Studio solution, however it makes sense to distribute them as a set of NuGet packages as you might not need all the parts …

Do you have repeating blocks in your VSTS release pipelines? I certainly do. A common one is to run a set of functional test, so I need to repeatedly … Deploy some test files to a VM Deploy a test agent to the VM – IMPORTANT I had not realised you can only run one test run against this deployed agent. You need to …