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Creating VSTS Extensions for Visual Studio Marketplace

Hello! One of the neat things about VSTS is the Visual Studio Marketplace. To quote the VSTS Support Page , the Visual Studio Marketplace is “new destination and the exclusive place for purchasing subscriptions, and for discovering extensions for Visual Studio Team Services and Visual Studio Code.” OK, sounds pretty exciting. But what is an Extension? Again, let’s use Microsoft’s own documentation about Extensions – “Extensions are simple add-ons that can be used to customize and extend your DevOps experience with VSTS. They are written with standard technologies - HTML, JavaScript, CSS - and can be developed using your preferred

Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio - configuring a VSTS repo from the Github sample repo

Mid-way through writing what I expected to be the second post on establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio, I realised the second post needed to be about configuring a VSTS repo from the Github sample repo git_workflow_sample_setup , since this action will be repeated for each of the subsequent posts that will look into merge, rebase and commit squashing. The sample code and branch structure are described in the first post Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio . First of all Throughout this post I assume the reader has some familiarity with VSTS. When

Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio - pull requests

In this post I will look at pull request processing in VSTS. Over and above the pull request process, what is also interesting is any differences in the commit graph on the remote repo when merging up from a merged as compared to a rebased branch. As with previous posts in this series, this post will not make a case for either, though findings will contribute to the workflow that will be decided upon. All posts in this series on establishing a git workflow for VSTS and Visual Studio are: Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio Configuring

Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio - git rebase

In this post I will look at git rebase in Visual Studio, in particular rebasing a working branch onto master and at what happens to each commit. This post will not make a case for rebase over alternatives, though the findings will contribute to the workflow that will be decided upon. All posts in this series on establishing a git workflow for VSTS and Visual Studio are: Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio Configuring a VSTS repo from the Github sample repo Git merge Git rebase (this post) Recap on setup If you have just landed on

VSTS Hosted Build Specs: The Script

Some months back, I published a post about the VSTS Hosted Build Agent’s specs. One thing I didn’t add was the PowerShell script that I used to get these details. Mainly because I couldn’t find the script anymore… So by popular demand here is the script I used to get the build specs. I ran it as an in-line PowerShell script as part of a build that was being run on the Hosted Build Agent.     Here is the output from the script:     The CPU has changed since I last gathered the data about this: previously it

Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio - git merge

In this post I will look at git merge in Visual Studio, in particular merging down from master into a branch and at what happens to each commit. This post will not make a case for merge over alternatives such as rebase, though the findings will contribute to the workflow that will be decided upon. All posts in this series on establishing a git workflow for VSTS and Visual Studio are: Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio Configuring a VSTS repo from the Github sample repo Git merge (this post) Git rebase Recap on setup If you

Establishing a git workflow with VSTS and Visual Studio

Here at sabin.io we use VSTS backed by git repos. We have a wide range of ability in git and though some of us have being using git for several years, we are not git wizards. The this is git cartoon by the folks over at xkcd.com pretty much sums up my early experiences, which in turn enforced narrowing my use of git to a limited workflow and a preference of git bash over GUI. And so, even though I’ve been using git for several years, I have only scratched the surface. When tasked with defining our workflow, I found I

VSTS Hosted Build Agent Specs

I was interested to know just what the hardware specifications of the hosted build agent is. So I added some PowerShell to read out the info below: 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z systemname      Name                                      DeviceID NumberOfCores NumberOfLogicalProcessors Addresswidth 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z ----------      ----                                      -------- ------------- ------------------------- ------------ 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z TASKAGENT5-0010 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz CPU0                 2                         2           64 2016-06-29T09:23:31.4095356Z Total memory:  7167.55078125 What piqued my interest greater was that this is the exact same spec for a D2 v2 box that is available via Azure. Clearly, Microsoft have a build agent template which is built, stored in a pool, and provisioned whenever a build

VSTS Git Repos no longer show as connected in Visual Studio

I hit something this week where one of my Git repos showed as disconnected in Visual Studio and Team Explorer was showing me the option to clone the repo. Which clearly I didn’t want to do as it was already cloned. You can see in the picture that I have the repo locally (at the bottom) but in the list of projects I get the clone button.   The root cause of this was that VSTS has been cleaning up an old artefact of its TFS history. For on premise TFS you have the ability to have collections, and one

SSDTPokedex: Integrating Slack and VSTS Into GitHub Repo - An Infinite Improvement

Hello! One of the home projects I’m currently working on is migrating a database over from SQLite to SQL Server. There’s several tasks that need to be accomplished before we can say that this is successful. Broadly speaking they fit into the key pillars of successful software development: Plan Develop Deploy Measure   So the development part is well under way: there is a repo in GitHub of an SSDT solution that will compile locally (it works on my machine anyway.) Plus I have a couple of releases: one intentionally broken and one fixed. Now there’s plenty of tasks I

Feedback requests to Microsoft

If you didn’t know Microsoft has a number of channels to provide feedback. Most historically user connect (connect.microsoft.com), it integrated with their internal bug tracking systems and meant that items flowed from the users to engineering and back. Well supposed to.   The SQL product group still use connect https://connect.microsoft.com/sql with a few teams also using Trello https://trello.com/b/NEerYXUU/powershell-sql-client-tools-sqlps-ssms and or Slack Slack - sqlcommunity.slack.com Visual studio is moving to https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/spaces/8/index.html from connect and also has https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide for ideas VSTS has a great support and also uses MSDN, and takes requests on Uservoice https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-team-services PowerBI has forums and uses user voice

Automating SQL Server Performance Testing

You run performance tests as well as functional tests when deploying new code changes to SQL Server, right? Not many people do, I think you should, and this article will show you how to do it by harnessing an existing performance tool, rather than writing your own monitoring infrastructure from scratch. Any good performance monitoring tool that records information to a database will do fine, and we prefer to use Sentry One . Here are the steps to accomplish this. Create a baseline database When you release your database change, you want to have something to compare against as an

Azure Powershell 4.0 may break your scripts

Ensuring backwards compatibility is something that one has to consider very carefully when doing continuous delivery. We are all to well aware of the challenges of this with database systems as, generally, the database lives much longer than the apps that interact with it and thus one has to maintain the data. SQL has far too many “legacy features” that can’t be changed due to potential breaking changes. Thankfully the SQL team now have a more robust way of managing change and that’s through the compatibility level for the database. This allows you to upgrade to the latest runtime but

Where To Find Us at SQLBits

Hello! SQLBits is back! This year SQLBits is being hosted in the Grand Hallway at the Olympia which was opened way back in 1886. This marks the return of Bits to London, and in fact the south of England, for the first time since 2015. Back then it was hosted at the Excel Exhibition Centre in the East of London. If you have never heard of SQLBits before, I’d be very surprised as it is the largest SQL Server Conference in Europe and offers world class training. But enough about the brief history lesson, let’s talk about what’s coming up

Uploading Files To Data Lake Store With PowerShell Part One

Hello!   I’ve recently been working on uploading files to Azure Data Lake Store . It’s quite straightforward and I think a decent introduction into automating a deployment with Azure, as well as a good example of writing scripts that are idempotent, so I’m going to go through them from beginning to end. I’m going to go into one function per day, so this will take 5 days to cover. But I’m hoping that by focusing a bit more in-depth as opposed to trying to cram it all into one post it will be more informative, and both yourselves and

Continuous Integration with Jenkins, SQL Server and Windows Containers

Why use Windows Containers? When creating database applications we need consistency in all our environments to ensure quality releases. Traditionally developers might have their own instance of SQL Server on their workstation to develop against. Database projects would be created in SSDT and pushed to source control when ready for testing. If you’re not using SSDT for database development already, then you should seriously consider it to make your life easier and increase the quality of your releases. Ed Elliot explains why in this blog post . A problem with CI for databases is that databases are a shared resource