So Day 0 of Build. A day to settle in and relax and register for Build. Myself, my mother and sister found ourselves wandering through San Francisco. Found our way back to the Microsoft Store..... We then headed off to our first interview with Sam Guckenheimer. I'll writing a separate blogpost talking about how that …

Many would say starting a nearly 24 hour journey with a storm is far from ideal but I would say it added some mild fun to the whole affair. Sadly storms mean planes cannot take off which turned a one hour flight into a one hour forty wait and then an hour flight. Alas it meant plenty of time for snoozes. Unfortunately …

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 to …

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

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you. We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments …

I came across Net Writer some months ago, when it's creator, Ed Anderson blogged about how he'd taken the newly-released Open Live Writer code and used it in his just-started Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for Windows 10. In January it only supported blogger accounts, which meant that I was unable to use it. …

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) …

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I can share the templates I use in my Resource Template sessions at conferences. It’s taken me a while to find the time, but I have created a repo on GitHub and there is a new Visual Studio solution and deployment project with my code. One very nice feature that this has enabled me …