Blog de Joe Freeman

One of my favorite features of Azure DevOps is its ability to integrate Work Item updates with Office Excel.  This means you can run any canned ADO query from Excel, update the retrieved work items and then publish the updates back to ADO all from inside Excel.   Microsoft Guidance See the following pages https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/office/bulk-add-modify-work-items-excel?view=azure-devops&tabs=agile-process https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/office/faqs?view=azure-devops Install Azure DevOps Automation Download and install Microsoft Office Integration tools by installing 2019 dev-ops automation   This installs a TFSProtocolHelper that ADO can use to open Query results in Excel Create an ADO query that will execute and fill Excel Click on the Queries  in the Boards Menu Create a Query and save it to create a named query I tend to create two-tier queries for Features  first-level children,...

I starting this project trying to build and deploy the  ASP.NET Core   example application  first on my local box, then in Microsoft Azure via Web Deploy, Microsoft Azure via local Azure GIT integration and finally via Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) via SCM integration. Deployment Types Local deployment into a local IIS is pretty straightforward. We won't talk about it here.  Remote web deployments are the legacy way of pushing Web applications to the (Azure) cloud that works with IDE, CI or command line. Compiled and static application artifacts that are then sent to the remote application servers via FTP.   The servers unpack the archive and deploys it. Remote SCM deployments are a relatively new and interesting way to support automated deployments and to support multiple branches with little work. The IDE or build system pushes source code to a monitored repository.  Azure (Kudu) monitors the source code repository, runs a build and deploys th...

This page describes configuration settings required to enable GIT integration when building code in Visual Studio team Services.  It will show you how to Enable CI builds when a specific GIT repository and branch are updated Provide the CI build with permissions required to make changes to a GIT repository Provide the CI build with credentials required to make changes to a GIT repository This diagram shows how GIT and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) might be used to implement a CI build triggered on check-in that merges code into another branch and deploys it.  The actual deployment commands are out of scope for this document. The following changes must be made on the Repositories configuration at the Project (Team) level and on the affected individual build definitions. We first show project level configuration and then Build Definition  configuration. Let VSTS Builds Update GIT Repository Some builds may need to update a GIT repository upon build ...

I occasionally participate in a workshop the LitheSpeed folks where we teach Test First Development using standard unit tests and Business Driven Development using Gherkin.  C# and Java developers participate in a mixed class. The first set of labs involves building a library first using developer style unit tests. The second set of labs involves building a library using BDD techniques.  The class wraps up with building a BDD style set of tests against an existing web site. I've created a small shell project on GitHub that contains both a basic Selenium unit test and a basic Specflow driven BDD style Selenium test. This makes it easy to start testing without the overhead of creating a new VS solution.  I built this project in VS2013 which has good NuGet, Specflow and Selenium plugin and Nuget support. The project uses NuGet Package Restore  to pull down the necessary dependencies in an almost Maven like fashion . The Selenium Web Testing development team co...

Microsoft has a nice TFS Eclipse plugin that acts like any other Eclipse team provider.  It provides full TFS Source Control and Team view support inside of Eclipse. You can find information about the plugin on the the Microsoft MSDN site . Team Foundation Server supports TFS version control (TFS) projects and GIT version control (TFS) projects.  TFS uses the concept of a workspace to track changes.  A TFS Project Workspace can be managed as either a "Server Workspace" or "Local Workspace".  There are several good articles that describe how this works phkelly's blog  and MSDN documentation . Server Workspace : These were the default for all workspaces created prior to TFS 2012. Server Workspace follows an older convention where all files on the local machine are marked as "Read Only" until checked out for modification.  This means you cannot edit files outside of TFS or Eclipse unless they have already been checked out for modification. Server w...

Background Code Analysis (CA) is a very useful Visual Studio feature that applies good practice type static code analysis to your code base.  You can run CA manually at any time or configure it to run automatically on each build. Automatic execution can be configured per configuration per project. This means you can enable automatic CA on Release builds while ignoring it during builds in Debug mode.  Some teams do this to speed up the debug compilation cycle.  I'm not sure what in CA makes it so slow that you can't run it all the time :-( You can view which CA rules apply for any configuration or CPU type via the Solution Properties window: You can set the automatic execution of CA on a per project basis in the Code Analysis pane of the Project Properties: The method of Code Analysis  menu item and the position of the results varies by Visual Studio Version. The menu item that executes CA is located on the Build  menu in VS2013. Unexpected Beh...