Mathias Olausson [MVP]

On June 17th we (Marcel de Vries, René van Osnabrugge and Mathias Olausson) are organizing the first Global DevOps Bootcamp! With local events happening all over the world we create a global event where communities passionate about DevOps on the Microsoft stack can come together, learn about the latest trends and share their experiences.

We want to create a 1-day event together with other communities all around the world.

The goals of the Global DevOps Bootcamp are:

• Create more awareness around DevOps in general
• Insights into where we are heading when it comes to DevOps and new technologies
• Get people’s hands dirty and let them play with all the good Microsoft stuff

The agenda is simple. We start with a kick-off (on video) of no one less than Donovan Brown. Then, your local partner will deliver a full fledged keynote around DevOps and where we are heading. The rest of the day we will get our hands dirty and do a hackathon to move an existing application towards a serverless/containerized solution with all DevOps practices in place !

We are kindly sponsored by Xpirit, Solidify and Microsoft and there are a number of local partners already organizing the bootcamp on location.

Call to Action

If you want to join (and you do want to J) follow these easy steps.

• Find your local venue on the Global DevOps Bootcamp website, or search for Global DevOps Bootcamp on EventBrite. It is free !
• Tweet, Facebook about it and invite friends! Our twitter handle is @gdevopsbc

If you want to be an organizer or a sponsor, reach out to us and we get you hooked up.

Hope to see you there!

Together with other Swedish ALM MVPs and colleagues at Solidify we’ve decided it’s time kick off a Swedish Microsoft ALM/DevOps meetup! We plan to meet about once a month to discuss the concepts and ideas in our field.

The first meeting is on October 25 at the Solidify office in Stockholm. We’re very happy to have Jose Rady Allende, program manager on the Microsoft VSTS team, join us online to talk about the Microsoft Team Service Agile Transformation story. We’ll also going to have a couple of lightning talks on some cool features in VSTS.

Here’s the link to the  meetup: http://www.meetup.com/swedish-ms-alm-devops/ and make sure to join the group so you don’t miss the next meetup!

We’ve had the new extensibility on VSTS for some time now, including the ability to create dashboard widgets. With TFS 2015 update 2 the same extensibility became available to our on-premise TFS and with TFS 2015 update 3 we now also have support for custom dashboard widgets.

Give this we just released an update to the Countdown Widget which adds support for on-premise TFS installation, which has been a much asked for capability.

Get the latest version from the Visual Studio Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.CountdownWidget

If you are curios how the widget is implemented then I recommend taking a look at the articles Wouter de Kort and I wrote a while back:

• Getting started with widgets
• Developing the widget
• Issues and resolving them
• Publishing widgets

When releasing with Microsoft Release Manager “vNext” the linked builds don’t automatically get marked as retained forever. If you want to be able to re-deploy released builds you want to ensure the builds are not deleted by retention polices. It’s a good idea to let the release definition take care of this (at some point, perhaps in the release to production stage) and mark the released builds as retained.

Here’s a PowerShell script that gets the builds used in the release and set the “keep forever” flag on the builds:

You can use this from your release definition either by including the script in one of the build artifacts and reference it or using an in-line PowerShell script step:

Note: the script above works with an on-prem TFS (using default credentials), if you want to use it with VSTS you need to include an authentication header instead and pass a personal access token.

$username = “”
$password = “PASTE-YOUR-PERSONALACCESSTOKEN-HERE”
$basicAuth = (“{0}:{1}” -f $username,$password)
$basicAuth = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($basicAuth)
$basicAuth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($basicAuth)
$headers = @{Authorization=(“Basic {0}” -f $basicAuth)}

Then replace the –UseDefaultCredentials with -headers $headers.

Get the complete script here (rename to .ps1).

In my DevOps and Continuous Delivery presentations I’m always including a step in the build process where source files are updated with the current build number. This gives us an easy way to correlate the produced package to the build it came from, which is great for traceability.

Enough people have asked for the script so I feel I should post it here. It’s really nothing special, just a lightly customized version of the original sample script Andy Lewis wrote a long time ago. The sample comes from mine and Jakob’s book on Continuous Delivery so make sure to get a copy if you want more context.

The script will apply a version to the source files, for instance updating AssemblyInfo attributes like this:

Our script will also update the version number for database projects (DACPAC packages) and Android manifest files. It’s easy to extend the script to do the same for Wix projects (MSIs) or C++ (RC) files following the same principles.

All you need to do to add it to your source code repository and use a PowerShell build step to run the script. In our example you need to pass the build source directory and the build number to the task:

Download the complete script here (and rename it to .ps1).

Just in time for the Connect(); event the new book I’ve been working on together with Jakob Ehn has been released. This book gives hands-on examples on how to implement a continuous delivery process using the latest Microsoft tools. It’s been great fun to have had the opportunity to work with all the new versions of the product and it’s really great to see how well the different tools fit together and help us build DevOps and continuous delivery solutions much quicker (and better!) than before. If you want to learn more about the new build, test and release management systems there should be a lot of useful content here.

Introduction
Building good software is challenging. Building high-quality software on a tight schedule can be close to impossible. Continuous Delivery is an agile and iterative technique that enables developers to deliver solid, working software in every iteration. Continuous Delivery practices help IT organizations reduce risk and potentially become as nimble, agile, and innovative as startups. Although not sufficient in itself, having a powerful set of tools that lets you implement practices such as Continuous Integration, deployment pipelines, and release management certainly will help you go a long way. With the Visual Studio 2015 ALM suite of tools there is now a very compelling offering that covers all areas when it comes to implementing Continuous Delivery. Also, as this book will show, these tools are open and extensible by nature, meaning that you don’t have to use every part of the suite if you don’t want to.

This Book

• Explains the concepts of Continuous Delivery.
• Shows how to implement a Continuous Delivery process using
  a modern development platform based on Visual Studio 2015,
  Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Online, and Microsoft
  Azure.
• Gives you practical guidance and ready-to-use recipes to help you
  build your own Continuous Delivery pipeline.

What You Will Learn

• What Continuous Delivery is and how to use it to create better
  software more efficiently using Visual Studio 2015.
• How to use Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio
  Online to plan, design, and implement powerful and reliable
  deployment pipelines.
• Detailed step-by-step instructions for implementing Continuous
  Delivery on a real project

Table of Content

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Continuous Delivery
• Chapter 2: Overview of Visual Studio 2015 ALM
• Chapter 3: Designing an Application for Continuous Delivery
• Chapter 4: Managing the Release Process
• Chapter 5: Source Control Management
• Chapter 6: PowerShell for Deployment
• Chapter 7: Build Automation
• Chapter 8: Managing Code Quality
• Chapter 9: Continuous Testing
• Chapter 10: Building a Deployment Pipeline
• Chapter 11: Measure and Learn

A while back I wrote a PowerShell script to automatically update a test plan with the latest build number (http://blogs.msmvps.com/molausson/2014/09/16/automatically-update-test-plan-with-build-number).

This script works well as long as the build server has permission to read and update test plans. But in some environments (such as when running on a hosted build agent in VSO) we need to do an explicit authentication. The solution I’ve choosen is to simply pass in credentials to the script and do an authentication before using the TFS API.

The script now takes two optional parameters if you want to authenticate, username and password, and you can just pass them in from the build definition.  You can use ether basic authentication and pass both or use the safer option and pass a Personal Access Token (PAT) in which case you only pass the PAT as the password.

Here’s an example where you go to manage your credentials in Visual Studio Online. First go to your profile:

From the Security tab you can either create a Personal Access Token:

Press Add to create an access token:

Copy the PAT (it cannot be retrieved later):

If you want to use basic authentication go to the Alternate authentication section and fill in the secondary username and password:

With this you are ready to use the script. Download the latest version from here: https://github.com/tfsbuildextensions/CustomActivities/blob/master/Source/Scripts/UpdateTestPlanBuildNumber.ps1

Check in the script to Source control and update a Xaml build definition to use the script. In the following example I’ve used a PAT and only pass the token as the password:

Check out the old post if you want a step-by-step instruction on how to setup the build and test plan.

We’ve just published a 1.3.1.0 release at https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com adding support for TFS 2015, we had to update the 1.3.0.0 release due to a namespace change from 2015 RC.

Release Notes

This release contains the following changes:

· Updated to support TFS 2015.

Download the release here: https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/releases/view/616048.

Post feedback to the Codeplex site if you experience any problems with this release.

Controls for 2013 and earlier can be downloaded from the 1.2.2.0 release: https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/releases/view/123638.
Controls for 2015 RC can be downloaded from the 1.3.0.0 release: https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/releases/view/615524.

För ett tag sedan spelade jag och Dag König på Microsoft in en serie filmer om Application Lifecycle Management med Visual Studio 2013 och TFS/Visual Studio Online. Förhoppningsvis finns det både smått och gott i samlingen av klipp som vi spelat in, är det något som saknas eller som du skulle vilja se? Lämna gärna en kommentar här eller på Channel 9.

Hela serien finns nu på Channel 9: https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/ALM-Potpurri

Här är en sammanfattning av innehållet i filmerna:

We’ve just published a 1.3.0.0 release at https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com adding support for TFS 2015 RC.

Release Notes

This release contains the following changes:

• Updated to support TFS 2015 RC.

Download the release here: https://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/releases/view/615524

Post feedback to the Codeplex site if you experience any problems with this release.