It’s finally here – the new web-based Release Management (WebRM). At least, it’s here in preview on VSTS (formerly VSO) and should hopefully come to TFS 2015 in update 2.

Recently I attended the MVP Summit in Redmond. This is an annual event where MVPs from around the world converge on Microsoft to meet with each other and various product teams. It’s a highlight of the year (and one of the best benefits of being an MVP).

I really like the idea of Docker. If you’re unfamiliar with Docker, then I highly recommend Nigel Poulton’s Docker Deep Dive course on Pluralsight. Containers have been around for quite a while in the Linux world, but Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon with Windows Server Containers too. This means that getting to grips with containers is a good idea – I think it’s the way of the future.

I love the new build engine in VSO / TFS 2015. You can get pretty far with the out of the box tasks, but there are cases where a custom task improves the user experience. The “Microsoft” version of this is SonarQube integration – you can run the SonarQube MSBuild Runner by using a “Command Line” task and calling the exe. However, there are two tasks on the Microsoft Task Github repo that clean up the experience a little – SonarQube PreBuild and SonarQube PostTest. A big benefit of the tasks is that they actually “wrap” the exe within the task, so you don’t need to install the runner on the build machine yourself.

In part 1 I showed you how to scaffold a task using tfx-cli, how to customize the manifest and how to implement the PowerShell script for my VersionAssemblies task. In this post I’ll show you how I went about developing the Node version of the task and how I uploaded the completed task to my TFS server.

SonarQube is a fantastic tool for tracking technical debt, and it’s starting to make some inroads into the .NET world as SonarSource collaborates with Microsoft. I’ve played around with it a little to start getting my hands dirty.

I was working with a customer recently that put a website into Azure Web Apps. This site needed to connect to their backend databases (which they couldn’t move to Azure because legacy systems still needed to connect to it). We created an Azure VNet and configured site-to-site connectivity that created a secure connection between the Azure VNet and their on-premises network.

I’ve been setting up a couple of VMs in Azure with a TFS demo. Part of the demo is release management, and I finally got to upgrade Release Management to the 2015 release. I wanted to test integrating with the new build vNext engine. I faced some “fun” gotchas along the way. Here are my findings.

TFS 2015 has almost reached RTM! If you upgrade to CTP2, you’ll see a ton of new features, not least of which are significant backlog and board improvements, the identity control, Team Project rename, expanded features for Basic users, the new Build Engine, PRs and policies for Git repos and more. Because of the schema changes required for Team Project rename, this update can take a while. If you have large databases, you may want to run the “pre-upgrade” utility that will allow you to prep your server while it’s still online and decrease the time required to do the upgrade (which will need to be done offline).

Recently I got to write a couple of articles which were posted on the Northwest Cadence Blog. I am not going to reproduce them here, so please read them on the NWCadence blog from the links below.