A couple of weeks ago I presented on DSC and Release Management as part of the Microsoft UK TechDays Online 2015 event. All the sessions from this three day event are now available on demand at TechDays Online 2015 on-demand sessions. You do seem to have to register/login to see the content, so I can’t deep link to my …

We use my TFS Alerts DSL to perform tasks when our TFS build complete, one of these is a job to increment the minor version number and reset the version start date (the value that generates third field – days since a point in time) if a build is set to the quality ‘release’ e.g. 1.2.99.[unique build id] where 99 is the …

Speaker registration for DDD South West has opened, problem is the event is the same weekend as the Maker Faire in Newcastle, don’t think I can do both. Both are great options though, good to have choices

Seem Windows 10 will be an option on the new Raspberry PI 2, that provides some more nice IoT options. It will be interesting to see which tools Microsoft look to target onto this board, I guess remote development from a PC as per their Galileo board. But there might be enough power for a bit more, we shall see

I have been trying to export a SQL Azure DB as a .BACPAC using the command line "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server120DACbinSqlPackage.exe" /action:Export /sourceservername:myserver.database.windows.net /sourcedatabasename:websitecontentdb /sourceuser:sa@myserver /sourcepassword: /targetfile:db.bacpac …

Whilst setting up a new agent based deployment pipeline in Release Management I decided I to reuse an existing component as it already had the correct package location set and correct transforms for the MSDeploy package. Basically this pipeline was a new copy of an existing website with different branding (css file …

I recently hit a problem that on one of our TFS 2013 build agents we could not run Windows 8.1 unit tests. Now as we know the build agent needs some care and attention to build Windows 8.1 at all, but we had followed this process. However, we still saw the issue that the project compiled but the tests failed with the …

Updated 28 Feb 2015 – Added bit on static addresses When using a DD-WRT virtual router, I have realised it is worth setting static a MAC address in Hyper-V and DHCP lease on the router for any server VMs you want access to from your base system OS. In my case this is TFS demo VM a connect to all the time. If you don’t …

I posted in the past on my experience with DD-WRT router running in Hyper-V to allow my VMs internet access. A couple of months on I am still using it and I think have got around the worst of the issues. The big problem is not with the DD-WRT router, but the way Hyper-V virtual switches use WiFi for some operating …

Susan Smith has posted an interesting DevOps article on the TechNet UK blog. Hidden away in a footnote is a link to recordings and slide decks for the DevOps track at Future Decoded, including my own session. Both the video and my deck are available for you to view online or download.