This a a repost of a guest article first posted on the Microsoft UK Developers Blog: How to extend a VSTS release process to on-premises Note that since I write the original post there have been some changes on VSTS and the release to TFS 2015.2 RC1. These mean there is no longer an option to pull build artifacts from …

Whilst seting up a Release Management 2015.1 server we came across a strange problem. The installation appears to go OK. We were able to install the server and from the client created a simple vNext release pipeline and run it. However, the release stalled on the ‘Upload Components’ step. Looking in event log of the VM …

You can use the filePath type in a vNext VSTS/TFS task as shown below 1{ 2 "name": "settingsFile", 3 "type": "filePath", 4 "label": "Settings File", 5 "defaultValue": "", 6 "required": false, 7 "helpMarkDown": "Path to single settings …

Updated 22 Mar 2016 This tasks is available in the VSTS Marketplace I have previously posted on how a PowerShell script can be used to run StyleCop as part of vNext VSTS/TFS build. Now I have more experience with vNext tasks it seemed a good time to convert this PowerShell script into a true task that can deploy …

Update 6 Feb 2016 - I have made some major changes to this task to expose more parameters, have a look at this post that details the newer version Today a good way to pull together all your measures of code quality is to run SonarQube within your automated build; in a .NET world this can show changes in quality over …

There have been some requests for more information about the areas I convered in my presentation at the Black Marble Tech Update 2016 that we held last week. I could send out slides, but I think it is far more useful to point you at the ‘live’ resource on the Internet. The key reason for this is that the whole of the …

As I discovered during my BlogEngine upgrade, there is an effort within the project team to focus the codebase on three possible usage models on any given BlogEngine server instance: Single blog with a user – a personal blog (default) Single blog with many users – a team/company blog Many blogs each with a single user …

I have just completed the upgrade of this blog server to the new release 3.2 of BlogEngine.NET. I did a manual upgrade (as opposed to the automated built in upgrade) as I needed to make a few changes from the default settings. The process I used followed the upgrade process document Downloaded the latest release and …

If you want to run CodeUI tests as part of a build you need to make sure the device running the test has access to the UI, for remote VMs this means having a logged in session open and the build/test agent running interactivally. Problem is what happens when you disconnect the session. UNless you manage it you will get …

My primary blog editor has been Microsoft Live Writer for years, but it has always been a pain to install via Windows Essentials (as I don’t want the rest of the product), also I was never able to find the right version when I rebuilt a PC. This was not helped by the fact there has been no development of the product …