Easy Configuration Updates During Deployment

  Published on October 24, 2019 ·  10 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

In a proper CI/CD setup where we are building once and deploying that build to various environments as it travels down the pipeline towards production there is almost always a set of configuration files that are different for each environment. Over the years there have been a number of different techniques that have been used to manage this like never deploying the web.config file during a website deployment or storing the various configurations and copy them to their locations at the time of deployment....

Teams (SubTeams) and Area Paths

  Published on March 22, 2019 ·  9 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

Back in around the 2012 release of TFS (now known as Azure DevOps) we were introduced to the concept of Teams. This was a logical breakdown of a single project that typically could represent an organization or at least a division. I come from the camp of one collection and one project as this gives you the most value and best experience and even though the product has evolved to be even more flexible then it has I think this is still the best approach to take today....

Red Gate tools vs SQL Server Data Tools

  Published on May 16, 2018 ·  18 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

Recently I have been tasked with showing a development team how to version their SQL databases using the Red Gate tools. Normally I mentor and give guidance in these kinds of projects using the SQL Server Data Tools but because their databases were so large they found that the SSDT approach would just not work for them. They did find in their own experiments that the Red Gate tools did not impose these limitations and worked quite well dispite their database size....

Linking the Iterations to all your Teams

  Published on March 2, 2018 ·  8 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

I am sure that there are several development teams out there that work similar to me. I am a big fan of the one TFS Project to rule them all and then using teams to separate the work. In my case I am working on my own but support several products, so I have a team for each of the products even though I am pretty much the only member on all those teams....

When Should we Move the Work Items to DONE?

  Published on October 9, 2017 ·  5 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

This is a very common question that I get asked by different software development teams as I make my rounds to helping clients with their ALM practises. There is a common pattern associated with this question and I know this is the practise when I see a lot of columns on their Kanban boards or worse yet a lot of states that they are tracking on the work items....