DevOps has been around for a while now and most developers know more or less what it is. In very simple terms, it means that after every code commit automated checks like code analysis or unit tests run to give fast feedback to the developers. Also, the deployment process is highly automated and shouldn’t contain any manual steps. This idea sounds straight-forward and not too complicated but what about changes on the database? Suddenly the...
Microsoft is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the .NET Conf on November 10 until 12 2020. This virtual conference offers 80 sessions with over 100 speakers from all over the world. The big highlight of the conference was the release of .NET 5 which succeeds .NET Core 3.1 and is the first step to a unified .NET platform.
The keynote was held by Scott Hunter and he started with...
As you probably noticed from our conference talks and trainings, we do a lot with Docker. Either to improve the build pipeline, have better artifacts or run complex microservice applications in Kubernetes. We often get asked from our session attendees and customers that all looks nice, but that they can’t use it since they still use the .NET full framework. This is absolutely not true. We can do a lot of things with Windows-based containers...
This week we ran into a problem when we tried to restore Nuget packages inside a Docker container from several private Nuget feeds. To restore Nuget packages from a private feed, we used the VSS_NUGET_EXTERNAL_FEED_ENDPOINTS environment variable and passed a Personal Access Token into the Dockerfile. This worked fine with packages from nuget.org and our private Nuget feed.
In this post we want to show how we restored the Nuget packages inside a Docker container...
Brendan Burns a co-creator of Kubernetes talked about microservices and why you should care about them. The answer is that you shouldn’t care about microservices. Rather you should care about your users, the performance of the application, and how easy it is to fix bugs.
If you have a monolith and it is working for you, you shouldn’t change it. Don’t change working applications...
Why is building microservices difficult?
Use Dapr for:
Dapr runs as a sidecar and allows service-to-service invocation. The hard part with microservices is...
On July 30th, Microsoft hosted the latest online .NET Conf. The topic was “Focus on Microservices”. Many famous speakers like Scott Hunter, David Fowler, Kelsey Hightower, or Jessica Deen talked a whole day about microservices. In this post, we will summarize most of the talks. You can find all talks here.
This is the first part of the summary. You can find part 2 here and part 3 here.
As with every TFS installation, the Team Project Collection (TPC) database begins to grow. Now and then, there are questions like “What kind of data is filling up our disks?”. So let’s have a look on how to answer those kinds of questions.
Do not manually manipulate any data or schema of TFS databases!
Everything described in this blog post is just about reading data and/or information form the TFS databases. Please keep...
This year, we decided to re-launch our website and renew the blog. The goal of the blog still remains the same, we still want to inform you about the latest news around the Microsoft technology stack as well as DevOps tools and processes.
Our old website was based on a rather heavy-weight CMS and therefore was hard to maintain and didn’t fit our goal to have a simle way to provide content to...
“Kleine Kachel, grosse (Test-)Welt” ist ein Artikel von Marc Müller und Nico Orschel über das Testen von Windows Phone 8.1 Anwendungen. Dieser Beitrag steht als Online-Artikel zum freien Abruf auf der Webseite des Windows Developer Magazin zur Verfügung.
Links: Seite 1 Seite 2 Seite 3
Haben Sie Fragen zum Thema oder benötigen Sie Unterstützung? Gerne stehen wir Ihnen zum Thema Testautomatisierung von Web, Windows und Windows Phone Applikationen tatkräftig zur Seite. Wir...
The next version of Team Foundation Server has been announced quiet some time ago. In the RC version of Team Foundation Server as well as Visual Studio Online, there is a preview of the new build system available. It’s now time to have a look at it.
First things first: The old XAML based builds (the workflow foundation based ones) are still good to go, if you already have made a lot of customizations and...
Last week during the //build/ conference, there has been a lot of announcements for the new version of Visual Studio, TFS as well as the new language feature and the compiler platform Roslyn. In this post, I’d like to point out some new features for C# programmers with the new feature set of Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6.
The first thing we notice if we...
Microsoft Test Manager provides functionality to manage and execute test cases. In this blog post I’d like to focus on the possibilities of a release and sprint oriented test planning. We would like to plan the tests for each sprint but still be able to easily keep track of all the tests of the current release. Finally we are going to have a look on how we can achieve a base-lining of test cases across...
Since the last update, we now have the possibility to use Universal Apps to share code between a Windows Phone and the Store App. From a technical point of view, there are three projects involved when you create a universal app: The phone application, the store application and a shared code projects. The shared code project is not an assembly as we know from portable libraries.The shared code project copies the source file to the...
I’m often asked about how to implement the assembly versioning during build. Back in the days, we had special build workflow activities to do so. Since TFS is supporting PowerShell scripts for pre and post build actions, we can easily implement the assembly versioning with PowerShell. This works without any modification of the build process. There are many different sample implementations available on the internet. Here I’ll present you my script.
The PowerShell Script will...
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Having a large lab management setup can be quiet cumbersome to maintain in terms of managing lab workflow definitions in Visual Studio. Often, you would like to test your software in multiple languages and on multiple operating systems. The combination can easily lead to 25 different build workflows, each testing the same software with the same tests just in different configurations. Its quiet obvious that tooling can support you with those kind of management tasks.
...
Visual Studio Online offers you a hosted build controller to build your projects directly in the cloud. With every Visual Studio Online account you will get 60 minutes of build time for free. If you are using Visual Studio for your productive projects you will certainly exceed the 60 minutes in a few days. This is no problem at all since you can switch the build resources to paid shared resources (see picture below). The...
Executing automated UI tests may result in bad performance or in a failed test because a UI element could not be found. So how we are going to analyze the automated UI test? The test execution engine also includes tracing functionality. In our case, we would like to have a detailed report that shows what is exactly going on during the test. This feature is known as HtmlLogger. This trace logger can be configured at...
Visual Studio 2013 and TFS 2013 have both native support for Git. Not all advanced features are supported in the Visual Studio UI, so there might be some situations where you have to do this from command line.
When you are working with your Git repository, you will be notified to download and install 3rd-party Git command prompt tools. Those tools will be installed by using the Web Platform Installer. If you closed...
Since Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server support Git as a source control system, there are a lot of conversions going on about when to choose what version control system. TFS is an Application Lifecycle Management platform and contained one version control system called Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) in the past. Since version 2013, Git is fully integrated into TFS as well as Visual Studio.
When we talk about Git and TFS a lot...
Die 4tecture GmbH wurde am diesjährigen Western Europe ALM Partner Summit mit dem Microsoft ALM Partner Award Western Europe 2013 ausgezeichnet. Der Award wird für hervorragende Leistung im Bereich “Application Lifecycle Management ALM” an Unternehmen durch Microsoft vergeben. Die 4tecture GmbH hat mehrfach bewiesen, dass die Unterstützung von agilen Prozessen durch die Microsoft ALM Lösung zu deutlich höherer Effizienz und Produktivität in der Entwicklung von Softwarelösungen führt. Dieses Jahr haben wir unseren Fokus vor allem...
Die alm AG und die 4tecture GmbH arbeiten seit geraumer Zeit partnerschaftlich zusammen und beraten ihre Kunden zum Thema Team Foundation Server bereits längere Zeit gemeinsam. Der TFS Geschäftsbereich der alm AG wird aus dem Unternehmen herausgelöst und vollständig von der 4tecture GmbH übernommen.
Die 4tecture GmbH mit Sitz in Zürich übernimmt per 1. April 2013 die Geschäftstätigkeiten rund um das Thema Application Lifecycle Mangement auf von Basis von Microsoft Visual Studio und Team Foundation...
Die AIT GmbH & Co. KG aus Stuttgart (D) und 4tecture GmbH aus Zürich (CH) bilden eine strategische Partnerschaft im Bereich ALM/TFS sowie Custom Development. Mit der Partnerschaft können 4tecture und AIT nicht nur Ihr Dienstleistungsangebot zu ALM/TFS-Beratung mit dem AIT TeamSystemPro Team und dem Schweizer Experten Marc Müller ergänzen, sondern auch die erfahrenen Nearshore-Entwicklerteams in Osteuropa verstärken. Damit können 4tecture in der Schweiz sowie AIT in Deutschland noch zuverlässiger und schneller kompetente Beratung sowie...
