Parallel Testing in a Selenium Grid with VSTS

There are several different types of test – unit tests, functional test, load tests and so on. Generally, unit tests are the easiest to implement and have a high return on investment. Conversely, UI automation tests tend to be incredibly fragile, hard to maintain and don’t always deliver a huge amount of value. However, if you carefully design a good UI automation framework (especially for web testing) you can get some good mileage.

Running the New DotNet Core VSTS Agent in a Docker Container

This week I finally got around to updating my VSTS extension (which bundle x-plat VersionAssembly and ReplaceTokens tasks) to use the new vsts-task-lib, which is used by the new DotNet Core vsts-agent. One of the bonuses of the new agent is that it can run in a DotNet Core Docker container! Since I am running Docker for Windows, I can now (relatively) easily spin up a test agent in a container to run test – a precursor to running the agent in a container as the de-facto method of running agents!

Updating XAML Release Builds after Upgrading Release Management Legacy from 2013 to 2015

You need to get onto the new Release Management (the web-based one) in VSTS or TFS 2015 Update 2. The new version is far superior to the old version for numerous reasons – it uses the new Team Build cross-platform agent, has a much simpler UI for designing releases, has better logging etc. etc.

Continuous Deployment of Service Fabric Apps using VSTS (or TFS)

Azure’s Service Fabric is breathtaking – the platform allows you to create truly “born in the cloud” apps that can really scale. The platform takes care of the plumbing for you so that you can concentrate on business value in your apps. If you’re looking to create cloud apps, then make sure you take some time to investigate Service Fabric.

Config Per Environment vs Tokenization in Release Management

In my previous post I experimented with WebDeploy to Azure websites. My issue with the out-of-the-box Azure Web App Deploy task is that you can specify the WebDeploy zip file, but you can’t specify any environment variables other than connection strings. I showed you how to tokenize your configuration and then use some PowerShell to get values defined in the Release to replace the tokens at deploy time. However, the solution still felt like it needed some more work.

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