Updated: 5th Aug 2016 added notes in PublisherID

  I have been developing a few VSTS/TFS build related extensions and have published a few in the VSTS marketplace. This has all been a somewhat manual process, a mixture of Gulp and PowerShell has helped a bit, but I decided it was time to try to do a more formal …

I have just completed the upgrade of our Blog Server to BlogEngine 3.3. This upgrade is a bit more complex than the usual upgrade as between 3.2 to 3.3 there is a change to Razor views for all the widgets. This means you need to remove all the old widgets you have and re-add them using the new razor equivalents.

As our …

Tracking the current version of StyleCop is a bit awkward. Last week I got an automated email from CodePlex saying 4.7.52.0 had been released . I thought this was the most up to date version, so upgraded my StyleCop command line wrapper and my VSTS StyleCop task from 4.7.47.0 to 4.7.52.0.

However, I was wrong about the …

There is no easy way to work out how long a TFS in place upgrade will take, there are just too many factors to make any calculation reasonable

• Start and end TFS version
• Quality/Speed of hardware
• Volume of source code
• Volume of work items
• Volume of work item attachments
• The list goes on….

The best option I have found …

In the past I have posted about the vNext TFS build tasks I have made available via my GitHub repo. Over the past few weeks I have been making an effort to repackage these as extensions in the new VSTS/TFS Marketplace, thus making them easier to consume in VSTS or using the new extensions support in TFS 2015.2

This it …

Did you know TFS was 10 years old this week? I have been working with TFS all that time, doesn’t time fly, and wow has the product changed from TFS 2005 to 2015/VSTS or what.

If you want to find out a bit more about the past 10 years try listening to the latest Radio TFS podcast with Brian Harry

It has been a while since I have mentioned any had new books on TFS/VSTS, and just like buses a couple come along together.

These two, one from Tarun Arora and the other from Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both nicely on trend for the big area of interest for many of the companies I am working with at present; best …

Updated 22 Mar 2016: This task is now available as an extension in the VSTS marketplace

A common request I get from clients is how can I create a custom set of release notes for a build? The standard TFS build report often includes the information required (work items and changesets/commits associate with the build) …

Azure provides many ways to scale and structure web site and virtual applications. I recently needed to deploy the following structure where each service endpoint was its own Visual Studio Web Application Project built as a MSDeploy Package

• http://demo.azurewebsites.net/api/service1 …