I've done a fair amount of ARM template authoring. It's not as bad as XML, but the JSON can get laborious. A number of my colleagues use Terraform templates and I was recently on a project that was using these templates. I quickly did a couple PluralSight Terraform classes to get up to speed and then started hacking away. In this post I'll jot down a couple thoughts about how we structure ...

Releases almost always require some kind of credentials - from service credentials to database usernames and passwords. There are a number of ways to manage credentials in VSTS release management. In this post I'll look at a couple of common techniques. For brevity, I'm going to refer to secrets as a proxy for secrets and credentials. Don't Store Secrets in Source Control One bad practice you want ...

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a cloud platform. That means it's publicly accessible from anywhere - at least, by default. However, Enterprises that are moving from TFS to VSTS may want to ensure that VSTS is only accessed from a corporate network or some white-list of IPs. To enable conditional access to VSTS, you'll have to have an Azure Active Directory (AAD) backed VSTS account. The ...

There are a lot of ALM MVPs that advocate the "One Team Project to Rule Them All" when it comes to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). I've been recommending it for a long time to any customer I work with. My recommendation was based mostly on experience - I've experienced far too much pain when organizations have multiple Team Projects, or even worse, multiple ...