This is a classic question I get at least once a year, regardless of TFS, VSTS, versions, etc. I cannot see my Product Backlog Item on the board anymore! Is it gone? Are we losing...
If you follow my speeches you surely know I am a huge fan of posh-git, an extremely handy PowerShell module to display inline repository information. Today I installed it in a Virtual Machine I am...
It happens. And the reason here is extremely easy and straightforward: if you have any permission on your AAD application for SonarQube which you don’t need you will be denied access The documentation was updated...
As I mentioned the new SonarSource-maintained activity allows for the SonarQube scanner to be run independently of MSBuild – very useful for repositories containing only JavaScript files for example, where you cannot use the MSBuild-based...
A few months ago I blogged about how the Marketplace takes advantage of the shared TFS and VSTS architecture to provide a good experience to the administrator when it comes to Extensions. Now the experience...
If you run a SonarQube analysis in your pipeline you might have noticed this: It is actually the case – the SonarQube extension is being spun off the product and transferred to SonarSource for further...
.NET Core brings so many changes, even if you don’t write production code on a daily basis you might want to have a refresh and that’s what I did with Christian Nagel’s book. It is...
In my last post I uploaded a task from the vsts-tasks GitHub repository to my on-premise Build Agent. How did I know it was going to work in the same way as with VSTS? First...
In my spare time I am looking at ASP.NET Core – it brings so much change that you can’t really ignore it even if you are not a web developer. After putting together the first...
Technology on its own is not really helpful IMHO – having an ecosystem really helps. So I noticed that VSTS now supports .NET Core in the Team Build, and obviously I wanted to give it...
If I’d get a penny for any question on this activity I would be a billionaire by today: It is a waste of time not sorting and creating proper folders for your artifacts – why...
Every TFS admin knows about the Operational Intelligence page. It is a very important tool for managing Team Foundation Server, which provides lots of useful information about service usage. Nothing like that existed for VSTS,...
It is amazing how quickly VSTS changes and evolves – of course you need to keep up with it as well This is todays discovery – the new Service Endpoint’s ACL management UI. In the...
It is great to see people approaching the Pipeline model, but of course the more people adopt it the more we need to go deep into the products we use to get the very best...
Team Foundation Server is around since 2005, and many features seem to be forgotten despite being in the same place as usual. If I asked for a dollar/euro/pound every time I was asked this I...
When you need to stand up a testing environment, a DR situation or simply a new instance from existing backups you might want to forget about SSAS altogether and go ahead with just the core...
If you paid attention to the latest releases of both TFS and VSTS you can see that the main path where they are diverging is on Process Template Customisation. And hey presto! I was asked...
Before TFS 2015 Update 3, if you want to restore an instance you need to restore all the collection databases of the instance. This might be an extremely long and time-consuming activity. Very quietly, Microsoft...
For one of our projects we use the StyleCop plugin for SonarQube during the analysis. As you can see it was recently deprecated. I successfully updated the instance used by this product to SonarQube 6.0,...
As we know, we can use VSTS to build Java code as well as .NET code thanks to the Maven instance provided by the service. It is one of the reasons why we can forget...
If there was a missing feature in TFS 2015, it was the lack of an integrated Package Management solution. Long are these days, the Package Management extension is bundled in TFS 15 RC1! You just...
It isn’t really about TFS 15 RC1 this time, but now the UI is totally out for it so it is very prominent there is a very nice feature I usually see being overlooked when...
There are a number of changes in TFS 15 RC1, and one I really like is the HTTPS configuration. When you configure the Application Tier you can now select the bindings you want: Clicking on...
This is a book I keep reviewing at every release, and for good reason: it is not mainly aimed at seasoned users of Visual Studio but at beginners approaching this IDE for the first time....
Another big change in TFS 15 Preview is the new Build Agent. This doesn’t mean there is yet another build server (the new Team Build is here to stay ), the big news here is...
In the last post we saw how to install and configure TFS 15. What about upgrades? Well, there are some changes… Starting from the usual wizard, you will select the option for existing databases: Then...
Yesterday Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 15 Preview, and I could not resist installing it as soon as possible The installation process is the same: What changed is the configuration process: The configuration of TFS...
One of the features introduced in TFS 2015 Update 3 is the backport from VSTS of SSH access for Git repositories. There is a very nice document on how to use it, so I am...
I took the plunge last weekend about building a pipeline for a very simple Java application, and it was very, very easy to do so. The app in question is DeepSpace. It is written in...
There might be a tons of reasons behind it – you might want to take advantage of SonarQube’s support for SQL Azure Database, and it is totally fair enough. There was a showstopper in the...
SonarQube 5.6 is the new LTS release, hence there are lots of changes. The first step where you might panic is when you launch it for the first time, you will find this: ce is...
These days it is extremely easy to start using Feature Flags, especially with a service like LaunchDarkly. In my case, I just wanted to setup a quick demo of client-side feature flags using only plain...
Everybody needs a starting point here and there, so this post would be pretty much about what I did with a very similar situation – a very basic pipeline to push UWP builds to HockeyApp...
The single feature I deeply loved from the old Visual Studio Online Application Insights (before it was handed over to the Azure Team) was the Developer Dashboard, a real-time overview of how your application was...
I usually don’t do this, but the VSTS teams are overhauling this area at such a pace that makes a knowledge refresh really needed Aside from the cards layout a few months ago, there are...
I started to look at HockeyApp recently, and I reckon it is quite an impressive piece of software. Microsoft acquired it in 2014, and now they are pitching it as the solution for Application Monitoring...
Last week Brian told us about Kusto, an internal data analytics tools which then became a component of Application Insights. You can start using it right away, there is nothing to configure. You’ll find an...
One of the announcements of todays’ //build is the availability of Bash on Windows, thanks to Ubuntu. I share the excitement as well, but focus on individual developers left something behind IMHO: it is a...
I mentioned that a few times – I am a real enthusiast when it comes to certain topics, and Lab Management is one of these. If you installed the SCVMM extension like I did in...
A few months ago I wrote a throwback article for MSDN about VSTS, its journey from “TFS in the cloud” to a full-fledged service, and its evolution. It is great to see how things evolved,...
So, big question: why should I run a pre-release Team Foundation Server update in production? Isn’t it risky? And what about support in case things go wrong? The biggest reason why you’d want to do...
When you analyse a project with SonarQube you are running the analyser with a predefined set of rules – they are the most commonly used rules, but not the most comprehensive. This has a lot...
Have you ever noticed this couple of small but very useful features in Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services? You can query across projects – think about it, you can create a cross-project...
With Team Foundation Server you can either remove a Work Item by changing its state (leaving it on the backlog then, not really a removal) or permanently destroy it. No middle ground, no real choice...
Just beware – if you are migrating stuff from a Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Team Services, it might happen that despite correctly moving all the Work Items involved in the migration you can’t...
This week Microsoft made published an update to the Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap, and it looks very promising. As we already know, TFS and VSTS are an ever evolving platform....
This is a short and easy tip with an interesting background. If you try to push stuff to a Git repository hosted in a VSTS account, where this account is backed by Azure Active Directory...
This is a quick but worth tip to remember. If you upgrade Release Management, you always need to update the Client. Up to this, fair enough. But you are going to start getting errors like “The...
Azure is an amazing piece of technology – its capabilities are immense and there is always something new to learn and use for solving our problems. It is quite a while I am spending time...
Well, they sorted it out! The Visual Studio 2015 installer is now componentised: It is now very straightforward to understand, especially for upgrades. This is true also for the third party components like the Android...
If you roam around a TFS/VSTS Team Project Administration page you will surely come across the Services tab: What am I supposed to do with these? Why is there “Endpoints” and “XAML Build Services”? Let’s...
With the rename, Visual Studio Online Visual Studio Team Services introduces the Marketplace for its extensions. It is a very welcome addition to the platform, as it enables scenarios of customisation in a very easy...
Today I updated our production instance of SonarQube to the eagerly awaited version 5.2. It is such an important release because it finally embraces a full client-server paradigm (whereas the runners had to talk straight...
Microsoft is always working towards improving the user experience of its products, and Team Foundation Server is no exception to this rule. There are two bits I really liked in the Upgrade Wizard of 2015.1:...
Another great new feature in TFS 2015.1 is the introduction of a real dashboard instead of a pre-built welcome page. This is an example: This is an upgraded Team Project by the way. There are...
TFS 2015 Update 1 is literally hot off the press, and I am already on it as the changelog is massive! The #1 priority to me was to have a look at Git and TFVC...
One of the problems you might face with Git is the performance hit when you start storing binaries into the Version Control. It is actually by design – Git takes content snapshots at every commit,...
When you try to access some services in Visual Studio Online, you might need to enter your Alternate Credentials. Think about Git, for example. This approach works, no questions about it. But in terms of...
A very interesting discussion came out at the SmartDevsUG meeting last night about the Kanban Split Columns in TFS and VSO. What is the real rationale behind it in a real world project? Why should...
Did you ever read a TFS update log? If not, you should do it. Once you do anything on the TFS databases, all the operations are logged, obviously. You can reach these logs from the...
