Azure DevOps - Scrum Bug

What to do when your build hangs on the Hosted Pool...

When your build freezes and you can't remote into the agent... You're basically blinded...

Solving TFVC error TF14067 and Azure Pipelines

When this happens you'll see the following cryptic error message that mentions: A path you are absolutely certain exists; A workspace name that was created minutes before when the build agent initialized; TF14067.

Azure DevOps

Configuring standard policies for all repositories in Azure Repos

By default you can only configure policies on specific branches in Azure Repos. If you're using a strict naming pattern for your branches (Release Flow or GitHub Flow), you may want to set a policy for all future Release Branches, or all Feature branches.

git

Setting default repository permissions on your Azure DevOps Organization

There is no UI to set the security at the Organization level. This is fine if you're happy with the default security settings in Azure DevOps, but if you want certain settings to apply to all projects, then it's sometimes useful to set the permissions at the Organization level.

Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)

Workspace management tips for TFVC

Workspaces are maybe the least understood feature in TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control). They're a great way to isolate different sets of files and changes from TFVC repositories.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps Extension Tasks 1.2.3x

It's been a while since I last blogged about the Azure DevOps Extension Tasks. Here are the things that have changed since the last update: Added support for publishing Visual Studio extensions.Support for versioning localized Azure Pipeline tasksSupport for executing under Node 10Fixed more promise issuesRenamed Visual Studio Team

git

Configure Visual Studio to use a different Git Credential Manager for Windows

Visual Studio ships with the Git credential Manager for Windows (GCMW) as part of its Team Explorer feature. This nifty little helper allows you to authenticate to Azure Repos among other git providers using your normal username and password and optional 2FA and it will handle the Personal Access Token

Azure DevOps

Connect any version of Visual Studio to Azure DevOps or Azure DevOps Server

Visual Studio has been around for a long time and there are still people developing in Visual Basic 6 or Visual Studio 2008. Even if you're using a more recent IDE, you could need one or more hotfixes and/or service packs.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

DevOps

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 traveled like a wave across the globe. Buck Hodges introducing the Global DevOps bootcamp

DevOps

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

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

Azure DevOps

New versions of TFS/VSTS build tasks

I just pushed out new versions of the following tasks: MsBuild Helper Task Fixed a number of bugs when the Agent's work folder has a space in it somewhere. Snyk Fixed auto-update of built-in Snyk version Added support for Path parameter to scan NuGet packages among other package types. Added

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

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 rights assignments

Azure DevOps 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