04 Feb 2017

TIP: Use Notepad++ to Count File Types

Azure DevOps, Tips
A few days ago I found myself wanting to figure out how many filenames being written to a log file were JavaScript files. One of the build tasks for an automated build (in VSTS) was logging the names of every file, recursively, beneath the source folder. In this case, there were a total of 15,475 lines written to the build log file. The question I needed to answer was, how many of these files are JavaScript files? While there are likely many ways to answer this question, I decided to make use of Notepad++ since I already had it installed…
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29 Jan 2017

MRU List in VSTS

Azure DevOps, Tips
Yesterday, I posted an article about Controlling Preview Features in VSTS. In that article, we saw how you could enable the new VSTS account landing page experience. Not only does this change the landing page experience but it also updates the icon in the upper left hand portion of the menu bar as shown below. Before the new experience: You can see the drop-down menu in the above screenshot for the “old” experience. You can also see the contents of the drop-down menu below, which includes a most-recently used (MRU) list of team projects. After the new experience: Once you…
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28 Jan 2017

Controlling Preview Features in VSTS

Azure DevOps
If you have signed in to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) recently then you might have noticed a banner something like this one:In this case, it is letting you know that you can try out a new feature enabling an improved landing page experience for VSTS. If you enable this feature, you will get the new landing page experience the next time you navigate to the home page of your VSTS account.However, did you know that you can also disable preview features (while they are still in preview) as well as enable them? Adding to that, you can enable/disable preview…
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17 Nov 2016

Connect(); 2016 – Announcement Recap

Azure, Azure DevOps, Conferences, Events, General News, TFS 2017, Visual Studio 2017, VSTS, Xamarin
The second day of Connect(); 2016 wrapped up today. While there is one more day left, it is dedicated to on-line training. This means that pretty much all the planned announcements have been, well, announced ;-)If you’ve been watching Connect(); over the past couple of days you have likely come to the realization that, wow!, there was a lot of stuff demoed and talked about and a TON of announcements! To help you sort through some of the announcements, I’ve attempted to capture most of the highlights and related links below. If you were too busy watching and digesting all…
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01 Sep 2016

VSTS Build Agent Selection Demystified

Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Build
One of the (many!) features I like about Visual Studio Team Services is that, while I can create my build definitions in the cloud-hosted service, I do not have to rely on the hosted build agents to run my builds. This is important because my builds might rely on specialized software that isn’t installed on the hosted agents. It’s also possible that my build processes rely on access to other resources on my local network that is not exposed to the Internet. In the case of the company I work for, we have several on-premises build servers each running multiple…
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10 Aug 2016

PSA: Hosted XAML Builds Ending Soon

Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Build
Earlier this year, Microsoft posted/updated some information on the Hosted Pool (i.e. where you run your automated builds in Visual Studio Team Services – i.e. VSTS). One item of interest in that post is that the hosted XAML build controller is planned to be shut down sometime next month (September, 2016).For accounts created after on or after April, 2016, access to the hosted XAML build controller was never provided, so this should not be an issue. However, if you have XAML builds running in VSTS, or were planning on migrating XAML builds to VSTS, you should take note.Here is the…
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08 Aug 2016

Tulsa TechFest–Slides

API, Azure DevOps, Conferences, Extensions
I first presented at the Tulsa TechFest in 2007, the second year for the conference. Since then I have only missed presenting one or two times (that I can recall). My oldest son (12) was able to attend this year as well and he really enjoyed the Gaming/Dev/Design track! The conference is really done well. I recommend you check it out next year if you’re in the area.This year, I had the pleasure to present two talks:Using REST with VSTS & TFSTeam Foundation Server (TFS) has been around for over a decade now(!) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has…
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09 Jul 2016

Markdown to WordPress Extension Published

Azure DevOps, Utilities
While I will always be a developer at heart (have been more many, many years!) by day I lead an enterprise architecture team consisting of four enterprise architects and four enterprise applications developers (along with an assortment of other contractors that help out with various development and architectural "hygiene" tasks). One area I continually push my team to excel in is communication. One of the various conduits we make use of is a WordPress-based site (hosted internally within our organization). For various reasons I won't go into in this post, we chose WordPress over SharePoint as the repository for the…
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30 May 2016

Why Should I Leave XAML Builds?

Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Build, TFS
If you have been using Team Foundation Server for any amount of time (say, 2 years or more) then it’s likely you have a decent investment tied up in your XAML-based builds. It’s likely that you have spent a lot of time tweaking the XAML ever-so-carefully to get your automated builds to do your bidding. It’s also possible that you have utilized multiple custom build tasks for scenarios specific to your organization that are not supported out of the box.Along with this, you and/or your team has gained a good amount of knowledge in learning how to tie the various…
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