TFS 2015

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.

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?

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

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

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

Azure DevOps

Publish your VSTS extension using Team Build and Release Management

While I've released my VSTS Extension Tasks to GitHub and the Visual Studio Marketplace some time ago, I was reminded that I've never really blogged about it yet. You may wonder what it does. The VSTS Extension Tasks are a set of tasks for

Azure DevOps

Automatically populate your Source branch when publishing to Sonar

When you enable your build definition to trigger on multiple branches, you may not want them all to publish into the same Sonar project. Sonar has the concept of Branches, they're simply appended to the Project Key with a -. This prevents an old

Azure DevOps

Access all available build variables from your VSTS Build task

This StackOverflow answer covers the options in the Node and PowerShell3 handlers. NOTE: This cmdlet works with the Powershell host that shipped with TFS 2015 RTM and which will be replaced with a new task runner. Whether this functionality will remain, is uncertain. If

TFS 2015

Configure SSL for SonarQube on Windows

The documentation for SonarQube explains how to configure SSL when you're running on Linux and how to use the native Tomcat functionality for a simple test environment, yet they recommend not to use this functionality in any production like setting. Instead SonarQube recommends the

TFS 2015

Publish Build Tasks to TFS 2015 without configuring Basic Auth on the server

When you want to publish build tasks to a TFS 2015 server, you need a Basic Authentication enabled endpoint. Unless your server is configured with SSL, this is a major security concern. Until now the guidance I received was to setup a second Application

Azure DevOps

Building multiple configurations and/or platforms in Build 2015

In XAML builds you could specify one or more configurations to build, if you left these values empty, the solution default would be built. Unless you were using a customized build template, each build|configuration pair would be built and tested in sequence. The

Azure DevOps

Upgrading from XAML to Build 2015 with minimal changes

This series is currently a work in progress XAML builds on Visual Studio Team Services will be deprecated in September 2016. While support for XAML builds seems to stay around on-premise for a little while longer, it's time to upgrade to Build 2015. You

Azure DevOps

Access multiple TFVC repositories in a Build 2015 definition

When you have a TFS project collection with many Team Projects, it's a common practice to have a "shared" project containing a collection of commonly used libraries. This library may consist of Checkin policies, Build Activities, MsBuild tasks and Custom MsBuild targets.

Azure DevOps

Add additional fields to "Edit Test Case using Grid" option in VS Team Services

If you're bulk-creating, importing or editing test cases in Visual Studio Team Services, you're probably aware of the "Edit as Grid" option, which opens your test case in a spreadsheet like layout for bulk editing: Not many people know that you can

Azure DevOps

Debug your TFS/VSO 2015 builds

The new build engine of Visual Studio Online and TFS 2015 is great. It's simple, easy to configure and doesn't require complex workflow designers. But when it's not doing exactly what you want it to do, it can be hard to figure out where

Azure DevOps

Enable parallel execution of tests using the Visual Studio Test Runner 2015.1

Does your machine have multiple CPU's or cores? Are your tests truly independent and thread safe? In that case you'll be able to speed up your test runs considerably by enabling multi-threaded support to the Visual Studio Test Runner. This works in both Visual

TFVC Checkin Policy

Ask a developer for confirmation in a TFS checkin policy

A TFS checkin policy can normally only be dismissed by overriding the policy. There is no way to selectively allow a user to override one, but not another policy. And