Published at December 31, 2020 · 2 min read
This blog is usually about technology and projects that I am working on or helping customers. This being that it is December and many of us having been working from home for the past 9 months I thought I would lighten things up. I want to talk about something that strikes me as pretty funny. I go on a walk every morning around 6:30 or 7:00 and have noticed some things in my neighborhood that strike me as a little funny....
Published at November 30, 2020 · 6 min read
For my next couple of blog posts I thought I would try something a little bit different then what you might usually see on these pages. Today I am going to talk about 2021, the topics that interest me right now and what you could be expecting to see in the coming months. The year 2020 has certainly been an interesting one for many. This was a massive change for a number of businesses where they were forced to rethink the way they were doing business....
Published at October 31, 2020 · 15 min read
Today I wanted to take you down an unusual path as I disclose some of the docker structure that I have configured recently in my environment. It has been my goal for a while now to run everything that I can in a docker container. What I mean by everything is that it is more than just my web sites and applications that I have been working as side projects for years but also includes some of the open source support tools that I use....
My Take on Software Versioning
Published at September 24, 2020 · 7 min read
A couple of years ago I was thinking of building my own version generator that would work automatically based on the kind of work item I was working on. This would have been an api call that would be called from the build taking in the branch information checking if this branch has already been registered and return me the appropriate version number. I thought it was a pretty cool idea and would have worked for me because I work on a single Product Backlog Item (PBI or Story) or Bug at a time and it gets released as soon as it is ready....
Published at August 20, 2020 · 6 min read
I have to say that I love Docker and working with Docker Images inside of containers. However, for the longest time I think I was looking at this from the wrong angel and I am sure that there are others out there doing the same thing. I think that this is because the explanation of this technology is usually done from an operational point of view and not from a developer....
Published at July 23, 2020 · 7 min read
There are new buzz words that popup all the time in the DevOps world. In the last few years one of those words that came up was Pipeline as Code. Everything is coming down to being able to turn it into code. As developers this has always been a natural step for us because we have always begun with code that then gets compiled and turned into working software. More than a decade ago there was a big push to try and re-train folks who worked on databases (DBA’s) to think in terms of database as code and keep that code in Source Control the one single source of truth....
Published at June 29, 2020 · 5 min read
I have recently changed jobs and the whole experience has made me take a step back and take a look at where I have come from. What roads did I have to cross to get here. My current position is working with various business units of a large company to adopt a DevOps culture. For the past nine years I have been working as a consultant helping clients to achieve a better DevOps experience around TFS and then Azure DevOps....
Published at May 2, 2020 · 8 min read
Welcome to the rest of your life. Right now we are in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and I hear people talking about the first things they want to do when things get back to normal. We need to re-think what our interpretation of Normal is going to be, unless we are willing to make some serious changes. If you think that Covid-19 was bad, the next one is going to be even worse....
Publishing a PowerBI Report to an Azure DevOps Dashboard
Published at April 15, 2020 · 4 min read
I have been working with Power-BI lately using data from my Azure DevOps Service. There are provided for us a number of pre build views that you can use in both the Cloud and the on premise version of Azure DevOps Server Update 1 and higher. But what really got me going was a set of templates that are available in the Marketplace called FlowViz. Basically when you install this extension if gives you two Power BI templates, one for Scum and one for Agile....
How I Work With Work Item Templates
Published at March 12, 2020 · 5 min read
Azure DevOps (aka TFS, VSTS) has always had this ability to save the content of a work item as a template. In older versions of Team Foundation Server this was more obvious once you downloaded tools like the “TFS PowerTools” but then it was in your face; there were templates. Today in Azure DevOps they still exist, are just a little harder to find and you can have a different set of templates for each team....
Published at February 22, 2020 · 2 min read
This post is about linking work items to a git commit within Azure DevOps. Doesn’t it do this almost automatically, you may be thinking? Well that was why I was surprised when I linked a work item using Visual Studio and then also tried to link the work items using the # symbol and the work item Id and found that the commit was not linked. I am almost always on top of the changes that are released almost every 3 weeks in the release notes for each sprint....
Integration Testing DotNet Core
Published at January 17, 2020 · 5 min read
It is pretty easy and straight forward to create a dotnet core application and run your unit tests during a build process. However, I also have some integration tests that I run in my Dev and QA environments where I actually hit my test database. This is not something that you would run in the build process as I do not have a database on the build machine and this is not something that would be worth the trouble to install one, especially if you are using a hosted build agent....