Security Configuration for Teams

Published at November 2, 2016 ·  8 min read

Typically if it does not matter if team member’s can view the work of other teams or maybe they even work across teams which is usually the case, then having Contributor access at the TFS Project is all that is needed and desired. However, there may be those situations where you find that you need to guard data from each team so that the other teams cannot see the source or the work items of the other team and yet be within the same TFS Project so that we can get good cross team reporting that makes sense....

My New 3 Rules for Releases

Published at September 23, 2016 ·  9 min read

Everyone of my products have an automated build and a properly managed release pipeline. At the time I just thought business as usual as I was always on my way to having a well performing DevOps operation in my personal development efforts. Well something happened in the way that I started approaching things which you don’t really plan, things will just start to happen when you get into a situation where everything is automated or at least they should and that is what this post is about....

My Experience with Git Sub-modules

Published at September 12, 2016 ·  5 min read

I just replaced my phone with a new Microsoft Lumina 950 XL which is a great phone. In my usual fashion of checking out the new features of my phone I wanted to see how my web sites looked. The operating system of this phone is the Mobil version of Windows 10 and of course is using the new browser called Edge. Well it seems that my blog did not look good at all on this new platform and was in fact not even close to being workable....

Some MSDeploy Tricks I have Learned

Published at August 3, 2016 ·  5 min read

In an earlier post I talked about Hexo the tool I use for this Blog. In that post I talked about how delighted I was with this process except for one thing that did bother me and that was the deployment to the Azure website. For this process I was using FTP to push the files from the public folder to Azure. Instead I was hoping for an MSDeploy solution but that is harder than it sounds especially when you are really not using a Visual Studio Project and MSBuild to create the application....

How I Use Chocolatey in my Releases

Published at June 10, 2016 ·  13 min read

I have been using Chocolatey for a while as an ultra easy way to install software. It has become the prefered way to install tools and utilities from the open source community. Recently I have started to explore this technology in more depth just to learn more about Chocolatey and found some really great uses for it that I did not expect to find. This post is about that adventure and how and what I use Chocolatey for....

Who left the Developers in the Design Room

Published at May 23, 2016 ·  5 min read

This post is all about something that has been starting to bug me and it has been bugging me for quite a while. I have been quiet about this and have started the conversation with different people at random and now it is finally time I just say my piece. Yes this is soap box time and so I am just going to unload here. If you don’t like this kind of post, I promise to be more joyful and uplifting next month but this month I am going to lay it out there and it just might sound a bit harsh....

Let the Test Plan Tell the Story

Published at April 5, 2016 ·  6 min read

This post has been the result of some discussions that I have had lately when trying to determine the work flow for a client but this often comes up with others in the past but what I had never used as an argument was the role of the test plan in all this. Besides being an eye opener and an aha moment for the client and myself I thought I would explore this thought a little more as others might also find this helpful in understanding and getting better control of your flows....

Living on a Vegan Diet

Published at March 7, 2016 ·  5 min read

In all my blog posts that I have written over the years I have never talked about health or a healthy lifestyle. This will be a first and you as a technology person might be wondering what has living a Vegan Lifestyle have anything to do with software. After all the blog title is “Donald on Software”. For years I would go through these decade birthdays and just remark how turning thirty was just like turning twenty except I had all the extra knowledge called life....

Migrate from TFVC to Git in TFS with Full History

Published at February 1, 2016 ·  7 min read

Over the last year or so I have been experimenting and learning about git. The more I learned about this distributed version control the more I liked it and finally about 6 months ago I moved all my existing code into git repositories. They are still hosted on TFS which is the best ALM tool on the market by a very, very, very long mile. Did I mention how much I love TFS and where this product is going?...

A New Start on an Old Blog

Published at January 14, 2016 ·  6 min read

It has been quite a while since I have posted my last blog so today I thought I would bring you up to speed on what I have been doing with this site. The last time I did a post like this was back in June of 2008. Back then I talked about the transition that I made going from City Desk to Microsoft Content Management System which eventually was merged into SharePoint and from there we changed the blog into DotNetNuke....