07 Nov 2018

Dark Theme in Azure DevOps!

Azure DevOps
A while back I was attending a local developer conference and I overheard someone say, "He's not a real coder; He's not using the dark theme." :-) Now, while I don't necessarily agree with that statement, I do prefer dark themes over light themes. Dark themes just seem to be easier on my eyes when I'm staring into millions of pixels for hours on end every day. While Visual Studio has provided a dark theme (as well as others) out of the box for some time now, and VS Code has had a dark theme from its start (as best…
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11 Sep 2018

Azure DevOps Launch Event

Azure DevOps
Odds are, you've noticed by now that Microsoft introduced Azure DevOps yesterday. While there are a lot of details around this announcement, the short version is that Azure DevOps is an evolution of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and introduces the following:     Azure Pipelines CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously. Learn More >   Azure Boards Powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting. Learn more >   Azure Artifacts Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.…
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16 Jul 2018

Hiding Unused Services within VSTS

Azure DevOps
New Navigation (Preview) Last month, Microsoft announced some navigation UI changes coming to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). In short, the VSTS UI now places the primary navigation controls vertically, along the left side of the page. For example, once enabled, the default page for a project in VSTS might look something like this: The vertical navigation changes are still in preview*, so you will need to enable the preview to get the new behavior. To do this: Sign in to VSTS and click on your profile picture in the top, right-hand corner of the page. Click on the Preview…
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17 Mar 2018

Adding VSTS-Users to VSTS-Tools Samples

API, Azure DevOps
It’s been about two years since I originally created the VSTS-Tools project on GitHub. The original release had two command-line tools included with it:VSTS-Get – CLI to download a single file or entire folder tree from VSTS (only Git is supported at this time). VSTS-Keep – CLI to set (or remove) the “Retain Indefinitely” retention flag for a given build. Not only were the tools meant to be somewhat useful (I used them then and still use them today) but they were also meant to act as yet another set of examples on how you might make use of the…
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06 Mar 2018

Change Image Size in VSTS Wiki

Azure DevOps
I came across this on a mail list a short while ago and thought I would share it out…If you’ve been making use of the Wiki feature within VSTS then you already know how useful it is for providing documentation, notes, etc. in a centralized location for your VSTS projects. If you haven’t tried the Wiki feature out yet, you really should!The Wiki utilizes markdown syntax to provide you with some basic text formatting features such as bold, italics, underline, bullets, numbered lists, etc. It also provides some basic syntax for visualizing images. For example, the following is markdown syntax…
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15 Nov 2017

Connect(); 2017 – Day 1 Recap

Azure DevOps, Conferences, TFS, Visual Studio 2017, Visual Studio Code
Day 1Day 1 of Connect(); 2017 is in the books! If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live streaming event earlier today you can catch up on the various presentations and announcements here.There was a lot of exciting announcements made at Connect(); today. While I have no doubt missed several of them I have made an attempt to include most of the highlights below. If your favorite announcement isn’t in the list, please include it in the comments section below so we can all learn about it!Come back to the same location tomorrow at 11:00 AM EST to…
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07 Sep 2017

Installing the Cloud Load Test Agent On-Premises

Azure DevOps, Performance Testing
In the first post of this series on Cloud Load Testing with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) I showed you how to quickly get a cloud load test up and running. In the post we created a test than ran within the cloud and not on-premises. If you have a desire or need to run your cloud load tests using an on-premises test agent, the agents are very easy to setup and configure.If you don’t want to read each of the required steps for installing the agent, there are only a few, I have created a video that will walk…
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09 Aug 2017

Creating Your First VSTS Load Test

Azure DevOps, Performance Testing
A few weeks ago I gave a talk on Performance Testing with VSTS. Since I received so many questions during the talk, I thought I’d put together a series of blog posts on the subject. I hope to address some of the questions that were asked and will hopefully even answer a few that weren’t asked!At this time, I’m thinking the series of posts will include something along these lines:Creating Your First VSTS Load Test (this post) Setup Your VSTS Load Tests Even Faster!Installing the Cloud Load Test Agent On-Premises (video)Running VSTS Load Tests On-PremisesCreating VSTS Load Tests from an…
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21 Jul 2017

Performance Testing with VSTS

ALM, Azure DevOps, Performance Testing
Earlier today I gave a talk at this year’s Tulsa TechFest (love this conference!) on Performance Testing with VSTS On- and Off-Premises. In this session, covered the various types of load tests that can be executed with VSTS, including:URL-based TestsHTTP Archive TestsVisual Studio TestsJMeter TestsIn the demos that accompanied each of these test types, I showed where they could each be run in the cloud using VSTS and well as on-premises, also using VSTS (with the exception of JMeter which isn’t yet supported in all scenarios). I plan to cover each of these in a series of blog posts starting…
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30 May 2017

Deprecating XAML Builds in VSTS

Azure DevOps, Team Build, Team Foundation Build, Team Foundation Service
Last year, I wrote a post titled Hosted XAML Builds Ending Soon. Roughly nine months has passed since that post and, as of today, Microsoft has provided a bit more detail around their plans to deprecate the XAML build functionality within VSTS. Here’s an excerpt from the post:Deprecating XAML build support in future versionsTFS – In our next major TFS release, we will take the next big step in deprecating XAML Build support.  We will remove all support for XAML builds.  We will not ship updated installers and we will remove support for connecting XAML agents/controllers.  We will also be…
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