16 Feb 2016

Calling VSTS APIs with PowerShell

API, Visual Studio Online
Continuing along with my other various examples of VSTS API calls, I thought I’d include an example on how to call a Visual Studio Team Services REST API using PowerShell.To provide a concrete example, consider this scenario:We use VSTS-based builds to build our projects and create artifacts (e.g. web apps/services, binaries, etc.). We then make use of Octopus Deploy to deploy our artifacts into our various environments (e.g. development, test, production, etc.). Once these artifacts have been deployed to the production environment, we’d like to keep them around indefinitely.As you are likely aware, VSTS has a default retention policy on…
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13 Feb 2016

VSTS Keyboard Shortcuts

Tips, Visual Studio Online
Computers have been part of my daily routine for many years now (over three decades!) and I’ve used a lot of software in that time. My primary applications tend to include various software development tools (such as Visual Studio, ReSharper, Fiddler, etc.), productivity software (such as Microsoft Office, various text editors, etc.) and so on. Over the years, I’ve found that if I used a command more than twice in a single session, I will take the time to learn the associated hotkey sequence – assuming one exists. For example, in Visual Studio, I tend to build the source code…
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04 Jan 2016

Discovering VSTS APIs

API, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Online
Building on our current theme of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) API calls, let’s take a look at discovering what APIs are available.The likely starting point for figuring out VSTS APIs is the REST API Reference for VS Team Services and TFS. Here you can view the various information and examples for the APIs currently exposed by VSTS (and TFS). The APIs are broken out into major categories with each category including links to the various resources provided by their respective APIs as shown in the excerpt below:If you’re like me, however, you might enjoy viewing the available APIs just…
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03 Jan 2016

Calling VSTS APIs with C#

API, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online
In the last API-related article, Personal Access Tokens and VSTS APIs, we looked at how we can use Fiddler, along with a Personal Access Token (PAT), to query the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) REST APIs. In this post, we’ll take a look at how we can use a 3rd party Fiddler extension, Request to Code, along with the “Paste JSON as Classes” Visual Studio feature to jump start the process of calling VSTS APIs with C#. Pre-Requisites – Install the Extension Before we get started we must make sure we’ve installed the Fiddler extension Request to Code. On the…
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01 Jan 2016

Personal Access Tokens and VSTS APIs

API, TFS, Visual Studio Online
One of the great features of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) is its extensibility model. I am specifically referring to the REST APIs that Microsoft has started making available for their platform. Until recently, you had two options for authenticating with the REST APIs:Basic Authentication – requires that you enable alternate credentials on your VSTS/TFS account, Base64-encode them and send them “over the wire” along with your REST API call. This approach is simple though not very secure since your credentials are not encrypted “at rest” (though they are encrypted when used since the APIs…
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31 Dec 2015

PSA: Backup Your BitLocker Key

OneDrive, Security, Tips
Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption is a feature integrated into Windows that allows you to encrypt data stored on your computer/tablet. For the most part, everything “just works” and you never have to think about BitLocker once you’ve enabled it on your computer. However, it is possible that BitLocker could encounter an issue or condition that prevents it from being able to unlock your drive. If you’ve encrypted a portable drive using BitLocker to Go, and you’ve forgotten the password, you will not be able to retrieve your files. That is, unless you have a BitLocker recover key. Creating a BitLocker…
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30 Dec 2015

VSTS/TFS Feature Index

TFS, Visual Studio Online
While the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)/Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015 Feature Index has been out for a little while now, I’m not sure how many people actually know about it. If you’re somewhat familiar with VSTS/TFS then you are aware that you can use the VSTS/TFS platform to manage your source code, track work items and even run automated builds and deployments. But are you aware of everything else that can be accomplished with VSTS/TFS? You might be surprised!I am not going to detail everything the index covers because there is simply too much. However, here’s a high-level list…
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29 Dec 2015

Personal Access Tokens & VSTS

Visual Studio Online
If you happen to be using Git-based projects in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS – formerly known as Visual Studio Online) then you might have already encountered Personal Access Tokens – or, PAT, for short. If you are not familiar with PATs in VSTS then read on… :-)As you are already aware, you can sign into VSTS using a Microsoft Account or, if your VSTS account is tied to Azure, an Azure Active Directory account. This approach works great when using the web-based interface for VSTS or when using Microsoft tools such as Visual Studio, both of which provide inherent…
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28 Dec 2015

App Studio–Where’s it at Now?

Development, Visual Studio 2015, Windows 10
Nearly a year and a half ago I wrote about Windows Phone App Studio. In that article, I walk through the basic steps of creating a simple Windows Phone app that uses my blog site RSS feed to list and display articles. Nothing too fancy or even complex but it was enough to show that you could create an app that does “something” relatively easy and have it up and running on your devices very quickly.Fast forward 16 months and Microsoft’s App Studio is now simply, App Studio and is still designated as “Beta”. It is no longer Windows Phone…
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25 Dec 2015

My First Band Web Tile

Band
I’ve been wearing my Microsoft Band 2 since it first became available nearly two months ago and I was rockin’ the first version of the device before that. Suffice it to say, I really like Microsoft’s version of a health & fitness tracker (though it’s much more than that!).Being a developer at heart I decided I’ve owned this device far too long to not have created any apps for it yet. So I decided to take a look at the Microsoft Band developer site. When you first visit the site, you will see the following three options:You can make use…
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