Windows Server Fixing my Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 server A couple of years ago I bought a Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 server. It's a Network Attached Storage device that runs Windows Server. It has served me well for the last 5 years, but it disappeared from my network from one day to the other. It turns out
Ghost Use Google Search Console to optimize your Ghost blog I've moved my blog from Blogger to Ghost and I changed the domain at the same time. To make sure everything went according to plan and that my old links kept working, I turned on the Google Search Console. It turned out to provide me with a couple of additional nice benefits as well.
Ghost Featured Show Google+ comments from Blogger in Ghost I've added my old Google+ comments from blogger to the pages that were migrated to Ghost. I haven't found a way to import the those to Disqus, but I did find an easy way to show them on pages other than Blogger.
Ghost Continuous Delivery of customized Ghost themes using VSTS In order to migrate my Ghost blog I needed to customize the default theme to support some of the features I'm relying on: - Disqus comments - Google Analytics - Integrating Google+ comments. To be able to quickly integrate updates I'm maintaining a fork of the Casper theme with my changes.
Ghost Featured Migrate from Blogger to Ghost My long time readers may have seen a huge number of changes to the look and feel of my blog recently. After so many years on Blogger I finally took the plunge and moved to a new platform, a new domain, a new comment system and a new look. Say "hi" to Ghost!
Windows 10 Like what you see on Windows Spotlight? Save it! if you've turned on Windows Spotlight you'll get a new lockscreen background every now and then. Some of these are just wonderful and you may want to set them as your wallpaper (like me).
DevOps Featured Global DevOps Bootcamp 2018 recap Today was the day of the Global DevOps Bootcamp. And it was a blast. Last evening Central European Time the first teams started their learning journey towards DevOps in New Zealand and Australia and the #gdbc [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23gdbc&src=typd] traveled like a wave across
Agile Featured Use Mob Programming to maximize your learning The first experience with Mob Programming is usually total chaos and I tried to prepare the team accordingly. Trying out any new technique, anything that's out of your comfort zone, can result in initial chaos, it requires a bit of courage to move onward.
Team Foundation Server Install Team Foundation Server Power Tools side-by-side You might be connecting to multiple versions of TFS and use multiple versions of Visual Studio. Which Power tools work with which?
DevOps Featured Xpirit awarded Microsoft Global DevOps Partner of the year 2018 Wow! Just wow! Three and a half years ago our company didn't even exist yet. When I joined about 3 years ago our office was a small room on the 2nd floor with 3 desks and we sat on the floor doing our team meets. Shortly after that
Azure DevOps Featured Crafting complex Release Gate conditions in VSTS A recent addition to VSTS is the ability to run a quick check prior to triggering a release to an environment. These checks can be used to check that there are no new customer complaints, no important jobs running in the environment etc. This post explains how to build your own.
Azure Disambiguate MSA and AAD accounts Microsoft is finally closing the loophole that allowed you to create an MSA account (LiveId) with the same unique name as your AAD (Azure Active Directory) account. While it has been very useful in many cases to use the same ID for both the MSA and the AAD account, most
Windows 10 Fixing Edge, Start Menu and Cortana slowness I've had issues with my machine for months now and it was very hard to pinpoint the culprit. It resulted in: * Start menu freezing * Cortana/explorer bar search staying black for up to 30 seconds * Edge not wanting to open or regularly freezing I had tried all the
Azure DevOps New versions of TFS/VSTS build tasks I just pushed out new versions of the following tasks: * MsBuild Helper Task [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jessehouwing.jessehouwing-vsts-msbuild-helper-task] * Fixed a number of bugs when the Agent's work folder has a space in it somewhere. * Snyk [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jessehouwing.vsts-snyk] * Fixed auto-update
Team Foundation Server Clean up your Team Project Collection prior to migrating to VSTS To prepare your TFS Project Collection for migration, you may want to remove (stale) old data to reduce the database size first. Most actions are already documented here. Queries that can aid in detecting where your space is allocated are also found in this recent support ticket. Delete old workspaces
TFS 2018 TFS 2018 update 1 is available. So is the TFS Aggregator > Update: TFS Update 2 is out as well and Aggregator 2.4.0 supports it too. Brian Harry just announced the Release to Web of Team Foundation Server 2018 update 1 [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2018/02/20/tfs-2018-1-rtm-is-available/] . With mostly bug fixes and a few very
Azure DevOps Make a Group Team Administrator in VSTS/TFS In case your organisation is depending on an Identity and Access Management tool to assign rights to the tools in the toolchain, then it's likely that all of your permissions are handled through Group assignments and not to individuals. Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server allow
Continuous Integration Global DevOps BootCamp 2017 Yesterday we had a blast. It's the only way to describe it. What started with a small idea over beer in Seattle by a few genius minds, ended up catering to 1500 participants workwide learning about Continuous Integration, Delivery and the promise of Containers and Serverless to make
Tips 'n Tricks Add :8080 to your TFS 2017 bindings after upgrading to SSL Because TFS 2017 allows authentication with Personal Access Tokens (PAT) it's recommended to upgrade to SSL if you were still on port 80. The installer will even help with the configuration and can add a redirect from port :80 to :443. It doesn't add a a
Visual Studio 2017 Force uninstall Visual Studio 2017 If you, like me, are stuck trying to upgrade Visual Studio 2017, then you may only get unblocked by removing everything and starting afresh. Since Visual Studio 2017 is still in Release Candidate and not final, this is something we may have to deal with from time to time. But
Azure Pipelines Extending your Build and Release pipeline The new build and release engine that ships with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server 2015 (The Release Management bits shipped with TFS 2015 update 2) provides a whole new way of configuring your Continuous Integration and Deployment pipeline. A much improved and simplified way. You may have
Visual Studio 2015 Solve basic auth proxy issues with Nuget, Visual Studio and Xamarin (hack) When you're using Visual Studio behind a Basic Authenticaton proxy, you may run into issues restoring Nuget packages. While I've never found a real solution for the issue, and trust me I've tried quite a few workarounds like the ones listed here [http://stackoverflow.
Azure DevOps A quick peek into Team Foundation Server 15 Preview Gian Maria Ricci already covered a nice overview of what's new in the install experience of TFS 15 in the latest Preview Release. [http://www.codewrecks.com/blog/index.php/2016/07/09/impressions-on-installing-tfs-15-preview/] Let's walk through the new features in the product... though I suspect
Azure DevOps Publish your VSTS extension using Team Build and Release Management While I've released my VSTS Extension Tasks to GitHub [https://github.com/jessehouwing/vsts-extension-tasks] and the Visual Studio Marketplace [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jessehouwing.jessehouwing-vsts-extension-tasks] some time ago, I was reminded that I've never really blogged about it yet. You may wonder what it
Azure DevOps Publish your extension to a local TFS Update 2 server With the availability of extensions for TFS I've been looking for an easy way to publish extensions and their updates to the local marketplace. While I'm sure that Microsoft will at some point integrate the two, for now you need to manually sync the extensions between
