Monitoring Web Applications – Continuous IntelliTrace
If you have Visual Studio Ultimate and are not using IntelliTrace in production, you should be drawn and quartered. This is arguably the best feature of Visual Studio Ultimate, and in my opinion this...
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TFS 2013 Default Build – The GetEnvironmentVariable Activity
If you’ve upgraded to TFS 2013, then you’ll notice that there’s a new Default Build template. In fact, to support Git repositories, the product team moved the default template into a...
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WebDeploy and Release Management – The Proper Way
I’ve just completed recording a Release Management webcast (more on Imaginet’s Visual Studio webcasts here). While doing the webcast, I wanted to show how you can use tokens which Release Management...
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Build Script Hooks for TFS 2012 Builds
EDIT: My colleague Tyler Doerksen pointed out in his comments that my solution doesn’t do any error checking of the scripts. If your script fails, the build happily continues. I’ve added another post...
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Error Handling Poor Man’s RunScript in 2012 Builds
Yesterday I posted about how to create script hooks in a 2012 build template. My colleague Tyler Doerksen commented and pointed out that there was no error handling in my solution.Returning Error Codes...
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CrossBrowser Testing: ChromeDriver Window Hangs after Test
I have been doing some coded UI testing and running tests using Chrome (via the Selenium components). However, I noticed that when my test completed successfully, the Selenium (ChromeDriver) window...
View ArticleFix: Release Management “Service Unavailable 503”
At a customer we installed Release Management for their TFS 2013 TFS Server. The server component installation went really smoothly – however, it was only when we installed the Client that we realized...
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Fix: Release Management WebDeploy Deployment Fails: Access Denied
If you’re using WebDeploy and Release Management (as you should to release Web Applications) you may hit the following error: Info: Adding sitemanifest (sitemanifest).Info: Creating application...
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Integrating TFS and Project Server – Two Way Manual Sync
I often do road-shows showing off TFS and VS to customers around South Africa. Usually I’m doing this with Ahmed Salijee, the Developer Platform Specialist (DPS) for Developer Tools in Microsoft South...
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Project Plans, Agile, Pizza and Startups
Last week I posted about how to integrate TFS and Project Server “manually”. In the post I did put in a bit of philosophy about why I think project plans can be a Bad Thing. Prasanna Adavi posted a...
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Application Insights Telemetry for WAWS or Customer-Hosted Sites Without MMA
There are a couple of tools that change the development landscape significantly for .Net developers. One such tool is IntelliTrace– this revolutionizes how you debug production issues. Another...
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IntelliTrace Tips and Tricks: IntelliTrace Everywhere
Series Links:Part 1: The Basics (this post) – also guest posted on MSDevDiv SA BlogPart 2: IntelliTrace Everywhere – also guest posted on MSDevDiv SA BlogPart 3: Enable Custom IntelliTrace Events with...
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BITE–Branch Info Team Explorer Extension
Update 2013-08-30: The extension is now available for VS 2013.Branching is something that you should definitely be doing if you’re a modern developer. It doesn’t matter if you have branch-per-release...
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Adding Custom Team Field to MS Project Mappings
Note: This post is NOT about TFS and Project Server integration – this is for adding, editing and deleting work items using MS Project.I was working with a customer who are using a custom field (called...
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Why You Absolutely Need to Unit Test
I’ve written about why builds are absolutely essential in modern application development (Part 1) and what why Team Build is a great build engine (Part 2). However, if you don’t include unit tests in...
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Matching Binary Version to Build Number Version in TFS 2013 Builds
Jim Lamb wrote a post about how to use a custom activity to match the compiled versions of your assemblies to the TFS build number. This was not a trivial exercise (since you have to edit the workflow...
View ArticleFrequent Status Updates–What They Really Mean
Are you (as a developer) inundated with frequent status updates? Requests like: “How far are you?” “What did you do today?” “Where are we?” Or are you a project manager that requests frequent status...
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Fix: InRelease Demo “Hangs” on Keller’s 2013 Preview VM
Update 2012-09-04: Brian Keller posted a fix that seems to work for this problem (so you can run the InRelease build without connecting to a physical external network).I love Brian Keller’s VMs. I use...
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Getting Results from Backlog Overview Report in TFS 2013 Preview
One of my favourite reports in TFS is the Backlog Overview (Scrum) or User Story Overview (Agile). So after installing and playing with TFS 2013 Preview, I went to see what the report looks like.What I...
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Branch Info Team Explorer Extension (BITE) Now Available for VS 2013
Update 2013-09-12: I’ve updated the extension to work with VS 2013 RC (since there were some breaking changes from Preview).I wrote a Team Explorer Extension (BITE) a few months ago to show you which...
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