Dapper DevOps

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

Why shall I use Application Insights?

There has been a lot of noise around the latest kid – Application Insights on Visual Studio Online. It is a fantastic solution, but I did not clearly stated anywhere is: Why shall I use...

18 Feb 2014

Application Insights Visual Studio Add-in preview – what is that?

Brian Harry recently blogged about that, this is an add-in for adding Application Insights’ telemetry straight from Visual Studio itself. It is helpful, because once you install it you can add AI to all your...

16 Feb 2014

SQL Server AlwaysOn with Team Foundation Server – a great team!

High Availability and Disaster Recovery are the first two items on the list for a TFS Administrator, as Team Foundation Server hosts a critical service for almost every company with a linked development team. Frankly...

04 Feb 2014

New sprint, new release for Visual Studio Online

Microsoft just released a new sprint of Visual Studio Online, the first one of the new year. Three small but valuable items contained inside: Tags Querying, the possibility of removing weekends from the Burndown Chart...

23 Jan 2014

Groups Synchronization in Visual Studio Release Management

Why can’t I see my updated Active Directory groups in Visual Studio Release Management? It is a fairly common question. And the answer is pretty easy: by default, there is no automated synchronization. In order...

22 Jan 2014

Find hidden information in the Visual Studio Online Application Insights portal

No, I am not talking about something secret or left around. I am talking about when you skip the adventure to, for instance, set up Usage Monitoring of an application and you cannot find the...

15 Jan 2014

Custom Synthetic Monitors in Application Insights

We know it is extremely cool being able to monitor a website’s availability using the Windows Azure data centres all around the world, but what if I would want to monitor a specific usage pattern?...

07 Jan 2014

Visual Studio ALM MVP, again

Every year since 2010, the first day of the year is marked by the email from the MVP Award, and this year is no exception: I have been reawarded this year as well, for the...

02 Jan 2014

Keys for a painless TFS upgrade experience

This weekend I had to work on the upgrade of the main Team Foundation Server we have in production. Everything went fine – despite not everything according to the planned slick idea we had. The...

15 Dec 2013

A pragmatic approach to a better manual testing

I recently had to deal with a small Functional Testing Team (two people in total) which was used to have a non-structured approach to manual testing, with several Word and Excel files used to track...

10 Dec 2013

New TFS Upgrade Guide out!

The ALM Rangers just released the v3 of the TFS Upgrade Guide. Apart from the official announcement, etc., I wanted to give you a valid reason to download and use it if you are still...

04 Dec 2013

Recap of the Visual Studio launch!

So, very packed day!Visual Studio Online is among us. Nothing more than Team Foundation Service up to yesterday, but now with a lot more.First of all: the plans. We now have three plans, Basic, Professional...

13 Nov 2013

Application Insights in Visual Studio Online

One of the coolest things about Visual Studio ALM is that it is a continuously evolving platform. Application Insights is the latest addiction to the family, empowering the monitoring story on the Visual Studio Online...

13 Nov 2013

Feature Flags, the cornerstone of Continuous Delivery – a jumpstart

I had to talk about that so it is worth to share it there as well!One of the pillars of Continuous Delivery is the broad usage of Feature Flags in the code.What’s that? It is...

08 Nov 2013

How to change a TFS GUID and why is it extremely important?

If you are working on a test upgrade of an existing Team Foundation Server by restoring it on another machine, keep in mind it is not enough to discern it from the existing instance. Yes...

01 Nov 2013

Converting TFS 2008 servers to 2012 and 2013

As you know, Team Foundation Server 2008 had several limitations which prevents a direct migration to 2012 or 2013. It is a legacy release, good at its times but definitely not adequate anymore.Migrating it through...

21 Oct 2013

Visual Studio ALM 2013 is RTM: is it just Visual Studio and TFS?

As we know, Visual Studio ALM 2013 has been RTM’d and released. But is it just a new Visual Studio and a new Team Foundation Server? Obviously not. Apart from these, we are talking about:...

17 Oct 2013

Fix the “Cannot perform 'SetProperty of Text with value “” on the hidden control.” error

If you are trying to use Test Manager to record a manual test with a web application and then play it back, you might find a nasty issue while inputting stuff: the error “Cannot perform...

10 Oct 2013

Microsoft Monitoring Agent 2013 overview

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released the Microsoft Monitoring Agent 2013, the next generation of the very useful Standalone IntelliTrace Collector. It is a very interesting tool – as I mentioned at DevReach –...

04 Oct 2013

Review – Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010

I can already hear the voices…”why are you reviewing a three years old book?” “It is on 2010, it is outdated!” and so on.Instead – trust me – I would strongly suggest you to buy...

23 Sep 2013

How an automated release looks like – the InRelease side

Once you have an automatic build leveraging InRelease for its automatic deploy, the workflow is pretty easy and straightforward.Let’s say we make a whatever edit to a file in our project:We check it in, and...

17 Sep 2013

Work Item Queries Charts

In the latest sprint, Microsoft released a very nice feature for reporting purposes: Charts for Work Item Queries.It is incredibly easy to use. You do not need anything but Team Foundation Service. You can click...

09 Sep 2013

How an automated release looks like – the Team Foundation Build side

Well, when it comes to the Automated Release our beloved Team Foundation Build has not so much to do…apart from hers usual stuff, with a slightly different Build Process Template.For enabling an Automated Release, you...

09 Sep 2013

Your first InRelease Release

In the previous posts we saw the main pieces of InRelease, so let’s see how they fit together!You are going to create a new Release: it is based on a Template, and it has two...

01 Sep 2013

Team Foundation Server 2013 in production? With some help! TFS Upgrade Weekend

Microsoft scheduled a very interesting initiative for the 13-15 September: the Team Foundation Server 2013 Upgrade Weekend. What is that? It is a weekend where organizations can upgrade their Team Foundation Servers to the 2013...

30 Aug 2013

InRelease Components and Release Templates, what are they?

The most important parts of InRelease are Components and Release Templates, which enable deployments to be smooth and automatic.You can package as a Component almost everything, but everything starts from a build:You can define to...

22 Aug 2013

Some basic concepts of InRelease

Despite it is tightly integrated with Team Foundation Server, InRelease is – as far as today – a standalone product.It is formed of three components: a Server, a Client and as many Deployers you might...

12 Aug 2013

Letting System Center Operations Manager 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview talk together

Despite TFS 2013 is still a Preview, it is fully compatible with the other Microsoft products.For enabling the DevOps story, you need to follow the TechNet procedure as usual, but you need:to install the TFS...

05 Aug 2013

A little, unnoticed feature in Visual Studio – Notifications Center

It is not something you go around shouting “This is a life changer!”, but IMHO it has its own dignity and it is going to gain more and more importance in the future releases. I...

01 Aug 2013

InRelease and Team Foundation Server, tips for the setup

Recently Microsoft released a preview (non go-live, unfortunately) of InRelease for Team Foundation Server 2013. I am starting to have a look at it, so expect some content in the near future First of all,...

20 Jul 2013

Enhancing Agile Portfolio Management experience with Backlog Mapping

Yesterday the Team Foundation Service team released the Sprint 50 build, and one of the features shipped is the Backlog Mapping. Nothing too big or hard to explain: if you are creating a Portfolio within...

11 Jul 2013

How the best practice made it into the product: Workspace Mapping in Visual Studio 2013

It is well known that the best practice says “One workspace per project”. Unfortunately it is not always possible to make it as the default solution, for various reasons (typical audience, etc.). In Visual Studio...

03 Jul 2013

Some tips on adding other levels above the Feature

I know, I know – we have it on the MSDN. But I wanted to take the other route, which is not using witadmin and using the old Visual Studio 2012 with its Power Tools...

02 Jul 2013

Hosted Build Servers up to date with Windows 8.1

One of the reasons for using Team Foundation Service and others hosted services is not worrying about technology updates as they are carried on by the provider. Team Foundation Service is no exception and today,...

26 Jun 2013

Example on what Agile Portfolio Management is covering

I have been asked about a quick example, so let’s take this screenshot: This is something you can achieve today via Project. But it is not feasible in Team Foundation Server 2012 stating that the...

24 Jun 2013

Basics of Agile Portfolio Management: Themes and Epics

Apart from the technology itself, the introduction of the Agile Portfolio Management in Team Foundation Server and Service has a huge impact on the surface you can cover on your project. Beware: in most of...

13 Jun 2013

A huge leap toward the Agile Portfolio Management

Up to yesterday, managing something more than User Stories and Tasks, Bugs, etc. required a certain degree of abstraction and usage of specific tools like Project Server. With the newly revealed Agile Portfolio Management feature...

03 Jun 2013

Team Rooms in Team Foundation Service

So now after the Tech.Ed announcement the Team Rooms are available :) They are not just a chit-chat tool for conversations into the team. They are an invaluable tool for collaboration. First of all, we...

03 Jun 2013

Troubleshooting for dummies with Team Foundation Server

I have been asked how did I manage to understand the issue with the Work Item Synchronization Service I posted before, so maybe a broad answer could be better than a one-to-one. At the very...

27 May 2013

How Developer Operations fit into the Agile picture?

It looks like one of the buzzwords this year is DevOps. But what is it? It is the merge of Developer and Operations, which basically means everything that happens while running an application inside the...

22 May 2013

Migrating distributed branches from Git to Team Foundation Server

If you have to migrate (like me, today) a huge Git repository to Team Foundation Server, it’s very likely that you are going to hit one of the most common walls while migrating a distributed...

14 May 2013

Work Item Synchronization issue with Update 2

After installing the Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 2 it can happen that the Work Item Tracking Synchronization Service suddenly stops working, so that you can’t see updated areas and iterations neither in Visual Studio,...

08 May 2013

Behind the scenes of the Work Items’ states: Team Foundation Server Metastates

Despite present since the RTM version, the metastates became notorious to the mainstream after the introduction of the Kanban Board. Why? Let’s see… New, Approved, Committed and Done are metastates. Have you ever heard about them...

24 Apr 2013

Web Access Licensing for dummies

With Team Foundation Server 2012 the licensing became way easier, in order to have a clearer path of adoption for the involved features. One big example of that is the new Web Access. The new...

24 Apr 2013

A clarification on the Team Foundation Server Integration Platform support

Often many people think that as the Team Foundation Server Integration Platform is an open-source project, it has no support.WRONG!It is the only Microsoft supported solution for all the migration needs you might have. But...

14 Apr 2013

Solving mess on behalf of others: tf undo

Sometimes it happens the TFS Administrator has to solve problems caused by unexperienced (or untrained) users, and maybe the most common is to undo ‘ghost check-outs’.Here’s the answer: Attrice Corporation Team Foundation Sidekicks. Cool. But...

09 Apr 2013

DevOps 101: IntelliTrace to the rescue

We have seen how to fix the gap between development and operation teams in a quick&dirty way. There is a lot more to do, and tons of tools which can help us: the main one...

30 Mar 2013

DevOps 101: Managing Operational Issues

As we’ve seen, once Operations send to Engineering issues, they are just Team Foundation Server’s Work Items. This specific Work Item Type is tailored on the need of explaining a production incident, probably a bug,...

20 Mar 2013

DevOps 101: from production errors (ouch!) to Engineering

I decided to name this series after the classic introductive American class: 101. We are talking about DevOps (with Visual Studio ALM 2012), so DevOps 101 KABOOM!The first step toward Developer Operations is allowing production...

16 Mar 2013

Basics on Developer Operations with Team Foundation Server 2012

As we saw in the last post, the DevOps movement is making so much noise in the IT world and of course Team Foundation Server is not behind: here is the basics on the integration...

08 Mar 2013

UK, here I come!

As somebody knows, I am going to relocate in a few weeks in the United Kingdom. It’s a dream I had since I was a child, which now becomes true I am going to relocate...

28 Feb 2013

What’s all this noise around Developer Operations?

During the last months a huge movement is gaining more and more importance in the IT world: the DevOps one. What we usually covered until now is the Define-Develop side of the process. We never...

24 Feb 2013