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....

Linking WorkItems to Commits

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....

Easy Configuration Updates During Deployment

Published at October 24, 2019 ·  10 min read

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 at March 22, 2019 ·  9 min read

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....

Linking the Iterations to all your Teams

Published at March 2, 2018 ·  8 min read

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 at October 9, 2017 ·  5 min read

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....

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?...