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As promised, here are the slides from the Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master talk at VSLive Austin 2017. Here’s the abstract: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you probably don’t have any real power. […]

I just wrapped up doing my new Entity Framework Core for Enterprise Applications talk at VSLive Austin 2017.  I had a lot more content that I could have ever possibly covered in 75 minutes.  As promised, here are the slides and EF Core code samples for that talk. Entity Framework for Enterprise Applications What do […]

In my last post, I showed you how to set up a private NuGet server in TFS2017 and publish a NuGet package to it from a build.  But how do you reference and use that package in another solution and/or another build?  Well, keep reading and you’ll find out. I’m going to do this in […]

NuGet is for package management is great.  Refer to some package from your Visual Studio projects and you can easily include those binaries in your project.  And if you’re got some library that you want to share with the world, you can publish a NuGet package and everyone can use your stuff. But what if […]

[Updated 3/23/2017 — If you saw this talk at DevBoston or Code Camp Boston, it’s the same slides and code at NYC .NET.] I spoke at the NYC .NET Developers user group last night and gave my new “DevOps with ASP.NET Core, EF Core, & TFS2017” talk. DevOps is all about software delivery.  Create an […]

[Updated 3/29/2017 — Added a bash version of this script for deploying EF Core Migrations from Linux.] Entity Framework Migrations let you deploy incremental updates to a target database.  With Entity Framework Core (EF Core) this is done from the command line by going to the directory that contains your Entity Framework entity and migration code, […]

In my Entity Framework Core Migrations walkthrough, I showed a workaround for an exception when you add a migration.  If you ran “dotnet ef migrations add” on a netcoreapp1.1 project, you’d get the following exception. System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource, Version=4.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the […]

When you’re working automated builds and automated releases, you frequently need to edit configuration files like app.config, web.config, and appsettings.json. Well, I wrote a command line utility to do this and I figured I’d share.  I’ve got a version that is an .exe that can be used on a Windows build agent and I’ve got a version that’s written […]

I got a question recently asking how to make sure that your on-premise Team Foundation Server 2017 build agents are up to date.  If you’ve installed a bunch of build agents over time, you’ll notice that when you go to download the bits, that the version number sometimes changes.  They generally stay up to date […]

I’ve updated my Team Foundation Server 2017 install guide to add new chapters for installing build servers. This new version (v1.1) now has a chapter for installing the TFS2017 build agent on Windows and a chapter for installing the build agent on Ubuntu Linux 16.04. If you’re interested in installing TFS, here’s my TFS2017 install […]

As part of the on-going Scrum Myths series at Scrum.org, here are three myths related to people skills.  When I say people skills, I mean topics like emotional intelligence, emotional IQ, and person-to-person interactions. Myth #1: Scrum must be “huggy / feely” Word on the street is that Scrum has to be “huggy / feely”.  […]

Thanks again to Node Boston for having me come speak last night.  As promised, here are my slides for that talk.  Also, since we had so many questions about geo-distributed teams and time zones, here’s a link to a blog post I wrote on Scrum + time zones. Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The […]