Scrum Featured

Even more Physical tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

This is the 3rd post in a series of physical and digital tools for Scrum Masters, trainers and development team members. Adding a couple of new items proposed by the community.

Scrum

More Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car [https://jessehouwing.net/agile-physical-and-digital-tools-for-scrum-masters-and-their-teams/] . I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox. Time

Azure DevOps

Staged execution of tests in Azure DevOps Pipelines

When running Unit Tests in your build system, you may want to first run the most important suite, the one that should never fail, the ones that are currently being changed, finally the regression suite that may be slower to execute.

Visual Studio

Uninstall Visual Studio extension from the command line

After installation of Visual Studio 2019 preview, it wasn't able to start after installing all my favorite extensions. A vsix extension, can only be uninstalled from the Extensions window in Visual Studio itself. With Visual Studio freezing on start-up, that's not an easy thing to do.

Azure DevOps Pipelines

VSTS Build & Release to Azure DevOps Pipelines tasks

Out with the old, in with the new! With the rename of Visual Studio Team Services Build and Release Management to Azure DevOps Pipelines all of the underlying libraries are being renamed too. In order to stay up to date and receive the latest updates you'll need to make a

Azure DevOps

Tasks and Release Gates on RadioTFS

In this episode of RadioTFS we spoke about the Global DevOps Bootcamp, Azure Pipelines and more specifically Release Gates and setting up a pipeline for your own Azure DevOps Extensions and some other recent blog posts.

Scrum

Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

About 40 people gathered at the nlScrum meetup dedicated to physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

Azure DevOps

Pipeline extension scoped to a specific TFS or Agent version

In The Netherlands more and more cities are creating an artificial wall around the city centers for older cars, certain fuel types or lorries. This is happening elsewhere in Europe as well. A similar things needs to happen in the Azure DevOps marketplace now that the number of supported target

Azure DevOps

Fail your builds when tests are skipped in Azure DevOps Pipelines

When the Visual Studio Test Task in Azure DevOps Pipelines fails to find any tests it logs a warning and happily succeeds. It has been a regular request on the MVP community to do something about that and to ensure that builds fail when no tests have executed. Since test

Azure DevOps

What domains are used by your Azure DevOps account?

Almost every corporate client asks us this question at some point: Which domains and IP addresses are used by Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services). And given that it's a cloud service, it's not an easy question to answer. The nature of the cloud, it's ability to scale, fail

Ghost

Adding Google Custom Search to Casper

You may have noticed the little search box on this blog. This is not a standard feature of Ghost, it's Google Custom Search embedded in Ghost. In this post I'll walk you through the process to set this up. This post is part of a series: * Migrate your domain to

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps Extension Tasks 1.1.75

I'm happy to announce that version 1.1.75 of the Azure DevOps Extension Tasks is rolling out to the Visual Studio Marketplace. The last few releases have added a couple of significant features that I'd like to quickly highlight in this post.

Quality Code Featured

Hard lessons in asynchronous JavaScript code

Last Friday I received a bug report for one of the extension I maintain. It took a while to first reproduce the case and then to figure out what was happening exactly. I found that my assumption about the execution order didn't match reality and that I was fighting a race condition.

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 that the

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 the

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 we achieved

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