Conditional Build and Release Tasks in VSTS
Did you know that build and release tasks can be configured to execute based on logical conditions? Learn about this powerful feature for builds and releases.
Chip Off The Ol’ Blockchain – Part 3: How to Setup a CI/CD Pipeline with VSTS and Truffle
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has quickly become one for enterprise and indie developers the tool of choice for managing code repositories, processes, and test, and builds. With the rise of Solidity as the language of choice, Inevitably the need for CI/CD pipelines for Solidity smart contracts will grow. This short tutorial outlines how to…
Using SSH with Visual Studio Team Services
In April 2016, Visual Studio Team Services introduced support for using SSH to connect to Git repositories. Over the summer of 2017, Microsoft made a number of improvements to reduce latency and improve performance for Git connections. These changes take advantage of Azure Traffic Manager to route the traffic over the Azure Global Network. According…
Creating Recoverable TFS Backups
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about the cloud software-as-a-service solutions is that it can reduce work. Although there’s still a need for IT, some tasks – such as performing backups – are provided by the vendor. If you’ve ever tried to backup a Team Foundation Server by hand, you have can…
Creating a Temporary Visual Studio Environment
Sometimes you will find that you need a cloud environment for working on a project. In some cases, you need the environment to perform a task that would take too long when you run it locally (for example, downloading a large file to transfer to Azure Blob Storage). Perhaps you need a mobile environment to…
Data Science with R in Visual Studio
Like our previous post on Python, we will walk through all the really nice offerings Visual Studio gives us now when working with R and related tools. Since we looked at installing in the previous post, and the steps are the same, I will omit that from this post. We’ll just focus on all the…
Data Science with Python in Visual Studio
Yep, you read that right. Visual Studio isn’t the first thing you think of when you hear “data science”, but that may just change soon. In Visual Studio 2017 they have included several tools together where you can do Python, R, and F# data projects for analysis and visualizations. In this post we’ll go over how…
Visual Studio 2017 Will Be Released March 7
It’s always an event when a new version of Visual Studio comes out, and the general release of Visual Studio 2017 marks 20 years of Microsoft’s groundbreaking integrated development environment. Visual Studio 2017 will be available for download March 7, and Microsoft is celebrating the occasion with a two-day training for developers who want to…
New WintellectPowerShell Version with Visual Studio 2017 Support
We have a new version of Visual Studio coming soon so I did the work to update my WintellectPowerShell module to support it. And, what a huge adventure that turned out to be! I will discuss why its support for Visual Studio 2017 was hard a bit later in this blog entry. For those of…
Running Spectron Tests in Visual Studio Team Services Build
Having end-to-end tests and running them locally can definitely be beneficial, but one of the main reasons to have them is to run them automatically during a nightly build. Getting these tests to run in Visual Studio Team Services isn’t trivial. Here’s some tips on how to get them going. Setting up build definitions When…
Microsoft to Release Mac Version of Visual Studio
In a month of many surprises, Microsoft has one more for developers everywhere: It’s finally bringing Visual Studio to Mac. A preview version of Visual Studio for Mac will debut at this week’s Connect conference, according to a blog post the company published and later deleted. (Thanks to our friends over at Engadget for saving…
Paid Extensions Added to Visual Studio Marketplace
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace, home to hundreds of extensions for Visual Studio, VS Team Sevices and VS Code, will now offer paid as well as free extensions, the company announced earlier this week. Software companies will be able to sell their extensions to developers that use the Visual Studio integrated development environment under monthly licenses…