Draft Pull Request in Azure Git Repos

Pull Request are the controlled way to bring in the changes to your stable branches in your Azure Git repos, or for that matter all Git providers support Pull Requests. In Azure DevOps now you can create Pull Request as a draft so that it is giving the ability to developers to getting it ready and prevent it from being completed accidently by the reviewers. Let’s look at simple steps involved in creating Pull Request as a draft in Azure Repos.

Finding Membership Information of a User/Group/Team in VSTS/TFS

Managing permissions of a VSTS/TFS sometimes become a nightmare specially if you have many teams groups etc. created in your account and in team projects. It is important to have a way to find group membership of an individual or group, so that you can analyze where the memberships are assigned in order to make required maintenance or change permission activities. Lets look at a command which can help you find that information quickly.

Controlling Octopus Releases with VSTS Release Management

You may be using Octopus deploy for your deployment automation pipeline needs while you are having your builds and work items managed in VSTS. It is a good idea to manage the Octopus release pipeline via VSTS release management so that you have the opportunity to use automated test execution and capturing of test results, as well as easily generate release notes using the VSTS work items, using feature rich tasks and automation test results views in VSTS release management. Let’s look at the important steps required to make VSTS release management to successfully utilize your existing Octopus deploy process steps.

Securing Release Definitions When Multiple Teams Work on a Single Team Project

We have explored “Securing Build Definitions When Multiple Teams Work on a Single Team Project” in a previous post. Now the folders to group release definitions and applying permissions to isolate each team’s release definitions is also a possibility in VSTS. As we discussed in the “Securing Build Definitions When Multiple Teams Work on a Single Team Project” it is important to create the Build/Release admins VSTS permission group for each of the teams in the team project. Using the same admins group and the team we can setup permissions for release definitions folders. Let’s look at the steps in detail.

Integrating VSTS Package Feed to Octopus

Octopus deploy is used by many organizations as their continuous deployment tool. You can send a package to Octopus deploy server via VSTS build or release step, using  “Push Packages to Octopus” task comes with VSTS Marketplace extension named Octopus integration. However, if you prefer to use VSTS Package Management to store your packages, you can now consume them in Octopus by integrating with the VSTS Package Management feed. Let’s look at how to setup Octopus to consume VSTS Package Management feed packages. (We have discussed how to use VSTS Package Management feed as artifact source in VSTS Release Management in a previous post “Using NuGet Packages as VSTS Release Artifact Source”)

Building and Deploying Windows Services with VSTS/TFS

Generally windows services are deployed by creating an msi installer. It is possible to deploy msi via VSTS/TFS release management using the extension available in the marketplace. Packaging the windows as non msi would give opportunity to have more control on the configurations etc, when deployment and let’s see how to package a windows service and then get it deployed via VSTS/TFS release management.

Packaging "Assemblies in GAC Installed with SDKs" in Build and Getting Deployed to Target Machine GAC

There can be projects depending on assemblies in Global Assembly Cache installed with may be a internal company SDK, which would even be installed in developer machines and in build servers. These assemblies should be packaged with the project and deployed to the GAC of target machines such as QA,staging and Production etc.  as well. Since the code repo does not include such assemblies in the build server it may be required to extract those assemblies from GAC and packaged with the builds. Let’s see how we can get the assemblies in GAC packaged and get deployed to targets, using VSTS build and release management.

Securing Build Definitions When Multiple Teams Work on a Single Team Project

Securing a build definition is quite straight forward when an organization uses multiple team projects in VSTS/TFS to handle different applications they develop. Each team project build administration can be assigned to different individuals easily. There are organizations using a single team project to manage all of their applications, dividing them into teams inside a single team project. Let's look at possibilities of securing each application teams' builds in single team project for organization scenario.

Trigger Build Based on Label/Tag – VSTS/TFS

You might want to trigger a build for a team foundation version control (TFVC) Label applied previously or if you are using Git version control for a Tag. Git tags are quite nicely supported in TFS/VSTS web Interface, but Label in TFVC is still only manageable with the  Source Control explorer of Visual Studio. There is a user voice request to enable web experience for TFVC Labels, which you can also vote for . Let’s explore how to trigger build based on Tag or Label with VSTS/TFS.

Creating Multiple Artifacts in a Single Build

Sometime you may want to create multiple artifacts in a build for separate each project output into different artifact. This question was asked in a forum “To create CI/CD pipeline to deploy web application and windows service on different VMs there is a need to create separate artifacts, for both project. How artifacts for all projects can be published separately in a CI pipeline ?” To answer that question, let’s look at very simple implementation possibility in VSTS/TFS builds.

Running UI Tests with Unified Agent

You needed to setup dedicated machines for testing when using Run Functional Tests and you had to execute, Deploy Test Agent step and Copy Files step as prerequisites. With the introduction of unified agent enabling build, deployment and testing using same agent, now it is possible to setup pool of machines as Test clients to cater multiple project needs. You can even deploy and test using the same agent if you wish to do so.  Unified agent support is available to run tests as multi-machine distributed execution. You do not require to execute copy files task as artifacts downloaded by the agent can be used for running tests. Let’s look at how to prepare a unified agent for running UI tests.

PS Script Get All Team Projects Listed as HTML–TFS/VSTS

You may want to sometimes satisfy the needs of your team, specially PMs, requesting already available information in document format. Some managers are lazy to go and explore (that's why they choose to be managers not techies) and they sometimes expect information to be delivered to their hands . List of Team projects in each collection can easily be seen on the TFS web interface or in VSTS in admin mode. But here is a PowerShell script to generate the same list as HTML file with link to the relevant team project, if someone requested you to have it as a separate document.

Build Definition as Code with YAML Builds

Build configuration as code and store it in version control was a request from some time back. It is great to have your build definition as code alongside your application source code. Microsoft has now released preview of YAML builds for this purpose to VSTS. Even though as of now it is limited to use with VSTS GIt and GitHub, version control (TFSVC not supported) to create CI builds, it is just the beginning of a new way to think about defining CI, CD pipelines and it will evolve into much greater levels in the future. Let’s get a basic YAML build done to understand what it is.

Mistake in .sln Can Cause NuGet Restore Task in Build to Fail and Hide the Real Issue

NuGet packages are very commonly used in VS Development. Using build VSTS task NuGet Restore is general practice of downloading packages while doing the automated builds. Today suddenly a team ran into the same issue described here https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/97737/error-da-toolnuget400x64nugetexe-failed-with-retur.html. Let’s have a look at the real issue caused this error in this particular teams’ instance and how it was found and resolved.

Setting Quality Profile via VSTS/TFS Build for SonarQube

Sonar analysis helps to identify the technical debt in the source code of your project. Running it integrated with VSTS or TFS builds add more value by automating the quality checks with sonar server. You can define your own custom Quality Profile to analyze your source code with selected set of rules. Let’s look at how you can specify the Quality Profile with the TFS/VSTS build task, that can be used to automate scanning of your code, when using the SonarQube extension in the visual studio marketplace.

Code Review with Git in Team Services

Code Review plays important part in software development as it helps to identify issues that may be overlooked. Reviews on code improve overall quality of the delivered software, and reviews are done in different ways by the teams, at times using pair programming, peer review and formal inspection of code by team leads etc. Team Services Git  version control now facilitates Code Review, via pull requests.

Business Rules for Work Items in Team Services

For inherited process model in VSTS, you can use Custom Rules to define rules that can clear the value of a field, copy a value into a field, and apply values based on dependencies between different fields' etc. You can define actions against conditions using custom rules. This provide you the flexibility in VSTS to go beyond the level of setting a default value or making a field required. To customize work items in an existing team project of Hosted XML model for VSTS, or on-premises TFS, you have to customize, downloaded process template or individual work item XML files (using witadmin tool) respectively. Differences between process models are described here.

Changing Work Item Icons – TFS vs VSTS

It is now possible to change the work item icons  in on premises TFS  2017.2 and in VSTS. This is a cool feature allowing you to, recognize the type of work item at a glance. However there is a significant difference  between TFS and VSTS how you apply this change. Let’s explore how we can change icon for existing and any new tem projects in both TFS 2017.2 (works just same in TFS 2018 RC1) and in VSTS.

TFVC History Report with PowerShell

Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) is widely used with Team Foundation Server and in Team Services, as a source control system to manage source code repositories.Usage of TFVC can be found here. If you want to generate history report for TFVC including details of files changed and any work items associated with the changesets, you can use the script available at TechNet Gallery.

Show Hidden Fields with Empty Values for Edit - Kanban Cards - Team Services

With the latest release to Team Services Kanban Card has been added with a new feature. Previously, if you want to edit a value in a field that is currently empty, in the Kanban Card You  had to keep it showing even if value is empty. With the new feature available now you can let Kanban Card to hide a field, if it is empty and expand the Card to show empty fields  so that you can edit them.