Dapper DevOps

Scrum meets the pool – swimlanes in VSO’s backlog board

With the update of June 3rd VSO got a new and very useful feature in the Backlog Board: swimlanes. What does that mean? It means you can have this situation: This allows for an even...

23 Jun 2015

Beware of the Package Location in VSRM!

I am working on a few scenarios using VSRM and DSC, and something funny happened. Picking a build up for release, I noticed this: Localhost? I am pretty sure I didn’t enter localhost anywhere in...

16 Jun 2015

A note on reusing your custom fields

When you customise your Work Item Types you often start with a lone custom Field, and then you forget about it for a while. But what happens when you need to add the same field...

03 Jun 2015

A design consideration: SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Mode for TFS

There are a few bits of any Team Foundation Server deployment which are either taken for granted, or completely ignored. One of them is: Why shall I choose a Synchronous-Commit Availability Mode for the TFS...

17 May 2015

A design consideration: Reporting Services on the Application Tier

There are a few bits of any Team Foundation Server deployment which are either taken for granted, or completely ignored. One of them is: Why shall I install SQL Server Reporting Services on the Application...

08 May 2015

TF30170 errors and the TFS Cache

Weird things happen, like this: “An item with the same key has already been added.” How?! Nothing catastrophic actually – it is just a matter of clearing the cache. This happened because this instance of...

07 May 2015

Visual Studio ALM at //BUILD – recap

Tons of stuff at this year’s //BUILD! It was really exciting and there were a lot of news about Windows 10, Edge and the ecosystem. But this post is going to be about all that’s...

04 May 2015

SQ-TFS.Scripts, automation scripts for SonarQube and TFS

This is my second take at open-sourcing something! Yesterday I read about the fantastic joint release from Microsoft and SonarSource for an integration between SonarQube and Team Foundation Server. As a quality-first advocate, I was...

29 Apr 2015

Remember, remember, remember…to close the TFS Administration Console!

That was fun :) While working with TFSConfig I hit this error on a TFS Farm’s Application Tier… Oh, right, I have it open. I run the command again after closing the console and I...

20 Apr 2015

How to schedule a TFS Integration Platform session

You might need to schedule your TFS Integration Platform session at a certain time, and the TFS Integration UI doesn’t expose such an information. Not all is lost though, the UI relies on a Console...

08 Apr 2015

Why ‘Doing’ and ‘Done’ in the Kanban board?

Visual Studio Online introduced this feature a few weeks ago, and then I’ve been asked… Why is the split column inside another column? That is absolutely a fair question. Kanban rotates around the concept...

27 Mar 2015

Definition of Done on the Boards – how, and my thoughts on why

Last week Microsoft rolled on the latest Visual Studio Online sprint deployment, and among all the new features there is the possibility of adding a visualisation of the Definition of Done in the Kanban Board....

17 Mar 2015

A lap around the new Application Insights

I really like Application Insights – it is no mystery, just look at how many posts I wrote on it – and the last time I purposely played with it was around 2013.3 last September,...

09 Mar 2015

Why can’t I output the result of git log from a PowerShell script?

Git log is a special command, it uses a pager and it seems the PowerShell ISE hangs when you run into that kind of commands. If you try creating a script relying on running git...

05 Mar 2015

A first look at Team Foundation Server 2015

A few days ago Microsoft released a first CTP of Team Foundation Server 2015, together with another one for Visual Studio 2015. Whoo!I was particularly curious about Team Foundation Server, as the preferred way of...

25 Feb 2015

PowerShell DSC in legacy pipelines, or with no pipeline at all

It is true that PowerShell DSC is the newest kid on the block, but it is also true that we can integrate it in legacy pipelines, or where we have no clear pipeline whatsoever. How?...

12 Feb 2015

What are .tfignore files?

I was talking with Gian Maria this morning about the need of excluding some files from the Version Control, with both TFVC and Git. With Git (and the .gitignore file) you can specify rules for...

11 Feb 2015

The hidden gem of Microsoft Test Manager: tcm.exe

Can you clone a specific Test Suite into an existing Test Plan? Not really. Shall you resort to Excel, getting – in this scenario – an half-baked result? No, either. And what if you want...

03 Feb 2015

My first approach with open-source: TFSThemeUploader

To be fair, I’ve never been involved in open-source very much. I mean, personally. Moreover, I have always been quite shy of my stuff, as nowadays I mostly write scripts and no longer full-fledged production...

29 Jan 2015

Continuous-Integration-as-Infrastructure and Git Flow

This came out at Friday’s meeting of the London ALM User Group – can I set up an infrastructure CI build for my whole Git project, configured with Git Flow? I think Git Flow is...

17 Jan 2015

Visual Studio Release Management as a Service – a quickstart

Let’s face it – cloud computing is utterly cool (pay-as-you-use service, near 100% availability, no infrastructure costs) but it is not for everyone. Even myself, I keep maintaining my own lab even if I use...

14 Jan 2015

Useful SQL queries for the TFS Administrator

Right, right – I know: I would actually replace can with will, but people might think I am too harsh. Remember – the TFS databases cannot be modified by nobody but Microsoft, otherwise you won’t...

08 Jan 2015

Troubleshoot a Team Project deletion

A colleague of mines once said “it’s never a stupid question if you don’t know the answer.” So that post might sound stupid, but I had people asking for it hence…there it goes! You might...

22 Dec 2014

Reducing Technical Debt with Smart Unit Tests

One of the reasons behind Technical Debt is the lack of appropriate test suites around a certain feature. Especially when implementing something new, tests are critical in shaping a robust and quality solution. Often, if...

09 Dec 2014

Lab Management and Environments – what to remember

Lab Management’s SCVMM environments are nothing more than a bunch of Virtual Machines running somewhere in a datacentre. Really. I do not understand the reluctancy (almost fear!) when I mention it. Let’s start with Network...

01 Dec 2014

How to configure Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2013, once and for all

Every time I go at a conference/user group and Lab Management is mentioned I hear someone saying “Lab Management? I never understood how it sticks together…” “Wow, it must be an adventure to set it...

17 Nov 2014

Why can’t I delete a Test Plan with MTM and TFS 2013 Update 3?

Do you want to delete a Test Plan from MTM? Fair enough. Unfortunately the documentation is a bit outdated here – a quick Google to find this, and it is about Visual Studio 2010. It...

16 Nov 2014

Visual Studio Lab Management and Auto Provisioning

Despite it is very handy, the Auto Provisioning feature of Lab Management can become a trouble pretty quickly. If enabled, every Team Project will be authorised to deploy VMs in the VSTLM hosts, a situation...

05 Nov 2014

Impact of the new Visual Studio Online European Region

With the latest update Microsoft addressed one of the most repeated requests about Visual Studio Online. It isn’t a specific feature or capability, but it is a EU-hosted region for it! Up to yesterday, you...

28 Oct 2014

Can I host multiple Git repositories in Team Foundation Server?

Of course you can! I am in the middle of a migration project, and the team I am helping with has several Git repositories (converted from other version control systems) to upload to their Team...

23 Oct 2014

Again on the logs: are errors in the logs going to stop an upgrade?

A quick but interesting question came out this week: “if I see an error in the Event Viewer of the Application Tier, is it going to break a TFS upgrade?” Generally speaking – no. The...

16 Oct 2014

Logs, logs, logs…

Team Foundation Server is by no means an easy product – especially with large deployments. One of the most important aids in the daily maintenance is taking care of the logs, which are very descriptive.Apart...

09 Oct 2014

Hitting the limit on a Local Workspace

Everybody remember the introduction of the local workspaces in 2012, enabling offline scenarios with Team Foundation Server. But did you know they have a limit on the number of files prior to performance degradation? This...

23 Sep 2014

Application Insights: what’s going on?

I guess it has been a little overlooked, but there is a lot of moving around Application Insights…The biggest thing is that with Visual Studio 2013 Update 3, Application Insights is moving towards version 2.0....

20 Sep 2014

Again, again and again on the backups

This is a topic which I find coming back every now and then: backups of the Team Foundation Server. Team Foundation Server is a SQL Server-based product – hence most of the backups’ work happens...

11 Sep 2014

TFS Transaction Marking on SQL Server AlwaysOn Data Tier

If you need to manually backup the Team Foundation Server – you might have several reasons for not using the OOB tool – you need to follow this walkthrough on MSDN. What I’d like to...

28 Aug 2014

Why is my Incremental Analysis Database Sync going on forever?

Sometimes it happens... And that’s just because I stopped it. Why does it happen? The reason is pretty easy: if the job is running, but you have a network problem – an outage, like it happened to me –...

20 Aug 2014

How did I learn to get on well with Git

Who knows me certainly know I am not the biggest…err…fan of Git Thanks to Gian Maria and its continuous support on it I managed to understand how Git works and why it is so powerful....

13 Aug 2014

Can’t refresh the TfsOlapReport connection? Have a look at the Trusted Data Providers…

You open the SharePoint Dashboard and you suddenly see this error: An error occurred during an attempt to establish a connection to the external data source. The following connections failed to refresh. TfsOlapReport Fair enough,...

04 Aug 2014

Demystifying the Scrum of Scrums

The Scrum of Scrums is often saw as something ‘which grew out of control’, ‘just for Scrum Masters’ or something suited just to very large organizations. It isn’t, actually…and it’s not rocket science, either. A...

15 Jul 2014

Why is the new VSO Stakeholder Plan a game changer?

Yesterday Brian Harry announced the new Visual Studio Online Stakeholder Plan – basically, full access to Work Items only in Visual Studio Online (and on-premise Team Foundation Server) for everybody, free of charge. I believe...

10 Jul 2014

Test Suite and Test Plan customizations in TFS 2013 Update 3 – synergic work between development and testing

IMHO the most exciting feature of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3, among all its goodness, is the migration of Test Suites and Test Plans to plain Work Item Types – and the reason is...

08 Jul 2014

TFS Audits – how to create reports on your TFS usage in five minutes or so…

Some months ago I wrote about the TFS Audit Log, because a big part of my daily job is about governance, regulation and access management. This log is very, very, very verbose as it is...

07 Jul 2014

Visual Studio Online and Service Hooks!

Despite Visual Studio Online is a Cloud Service – so something you do not have on-premise and where you have limited room for customization – it has been recently updated with a critical feature: Service...

01 Jul 2014

Review – Professional Team Foundation Server 2013

It is The Book. It’s the book you should have on your desk, library, shelve, whatever if you are working with Team Foundation Server.I can describe it as a the most comprehensive book on the...

30 Jun 2014

How to use PowerShell DSC with Visual Studio Release Management

After the brief introduction earlier this month it is now time to push forward – let’s see how the Update 3 CTP of Visual Studio Release Management enables you to push your DSC scripts to...

18 Jun 2014

A quick look at the Team Foundation Server’s permissions inheritance

Straight with the sample – why does it happen… …even if my user is a Project Administrator? Because the single user’s permission are less important than the Team’s one – and as in this team...

04 Jun 2014

PowerShell DSC – extreme automation in a DevOps world

Release Management Update 3 CTP1 introduces support to PowerShell Desired State Configuration to deploy applications in your environments – this is utterly cool, but…why? Before looking at VSRM itself, I think a bit of introduction...

01 Jun 2014

Shared Parameters in Web Test Case Management

With the latest Team Foundation Server update (2013.2) we get a very useful feature in Web Test Case Management – Shared Parameters. We had it in MTM, but not in the web. Right now instead...

23 May 2014

The TFS’ Excel Reports won’t load after a SharePoint change – why?

I experienced a situation where the SharePoint instance used by a Team Foundation Server suddenly started raising errors while loading the Excel Reports inside a page. The error was “An error occurred during an attempt...

21 May 2014

Why bringing evidences to the Sprint Retrospective meeting?

The most common question in all the situations of an average software development project is not “How?” but instead “Why?” – and in particular: “Why did we do/act/decide that way?” With the wealth of technologies...

18 May 2014

Troubleshooting users’ issues with the Team Foundation Server Operational Intelligence

I tried to do something on the TFS but I got this error … Why? Fairly common situation for every TFS Admin on this planet and beyond. How to quickly get grip with the problem?...

06 May 2014

Review – Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

After Professional Visual Studio 2013 it is now time to go a little deeper on Visual Studio ALM – Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013 is out! The book itself confirms its aim...

05 May 2014

Can Scrum and CMMI live together?

TL;DR version – yes. Many think that Scrum (and Agile in general) and CMMI cannot live together. After some years researching about that, my opinion is that this assumption is false. Let’s keep things simple...

29 Apr 2014

How did I manage to get on well with Git

Having to deal with Git when you come from years of another Version Control System can be hard – I was very comfortable with the Team Foundation Version Control and in the rare cases I...

26 Apr 2014

How to check for Team Foundation Server’s job running time

This is very quick but helpful IMHO. Scenario: you are an external consultant and you need to run a job from the Team Foundation Server web services (ProcessWarehouse, just to mention one of them), but...

15 Apr 2014

Review – Professional Visual Studio 2013

Another year, a new IDE, a new book about it. Do you want to compare it to the last year’s one? Fair enough – it is an updated overview of the Microsoft development stack. This...

06 Apr 2014

IISReset and TFSServiceControl quiesce

“Isn’t it the same if I just run IISReset /stop to take the Team Foundation Server down?” No, it isn’t. If you just run IISReset /stop, you are just locking the IIS access – but...

22 Mar 2014

Suggestions for preparing a TFS deployment with SQL AlwaysOn

SQL Server AlwaysOn is a utterly cool technology, but it is not a technology itself which solves all the problems you may have. In particular, it is not just about tweaking a couple of settings...

11 Mar 2014

How to perform a TFS Security Audit

It is common to be asked for performing a security audit on Team Foundation Server, and it is not a nightmare as it would seem… The easiest way is to download the Audit Log. You...

02 Mar 2014