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Enable Verbose Debug Mode for TFS Build vNext
Here’s a “hidden in plain sight” quick tip: how to turn on verbose debugging mode for your Team Foundation Server vNext Build. The short answer is that you need to set the ‘system.debug’ variable to true for your build. You can set this to true for a single instance of the build or you can change…
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Edit a Connection String from a TFS vNext Build
In my last post, I talked about how to create an ASP.NET Web Application that’s easy to deploy from your Team Foundation Server vNext Build (TFS Build vNext). Well, part of the pain of deploying an ASP.NET Web Application (ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET Web Forms) from a build is dealing with database connection strings. So…
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An ASP.NET MVC Site That’s Easy to Deploy from a TFS Build
By this point, you’ve probably heard that Team Foundation Server 2015 has a completely new build system. As part of it, it organizese and compiles the code slightly differently than the old XAML-based TFS Build system. First off, when you run a vNext build on a build server, you got four folders: a, b, s, and…
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Create a TFS Team Project via the web
So all the hype and heat seems to be with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) lately. All the newest and coolest features show up in the cloud-based version of Team Foundation Server first. Well, there’s still plenty of cool stuff in the on-premise version of TFS2015, too. But sometimes these features can be a little bit…
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TfsUtility: Import / Export Build & Release Definitions + more
I’ve been doing a bunch of work with the new version of Build and Release Management in Team Foundation Server 2015 (TFS2015) lately and discovered a handful of things that I wish that I could do from the command line. Specifically, I wished that I could import and export my build definitions and release definitions. Well, a couple…
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Handling Passwords in Visual Studio / TFS Releases & Builds
Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) have these really handy features that let you define DevOps release pipelines for your applications. To get to it, go to the web portal for your Team Project and click the Releases tab. Whether you use Releases (aka. “Release Management”) in TFS/VSTS or whether you use…
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VSLive Austin 2016: Real World Scrum with TFS2015 Slides
I spoke at VSLive Austin 2016 last week. As promised, here are my slides and code for my Scrum + TFS2015 talk. Real World Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2015 & Visual Studio Team Services You’ve got Team Foundation Server 2015 and you’re looking to do Scrum. Ok. Great. Now what does that mean? What…
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Learn to Customize TFS2015 Build with Environment Variables
You’ve probably noticed that Team Foundation Server 2015 introduces a new automated build system. One of the great things about this new system is that it’s based on PowerShell. At this point, you’re probably thinking “Ok. PowerShell. Fantastic. Why do I care?” Well, that PowerShell-centric approach allows you to much more easily customize your builds.…
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Walkthrough: Create a new TFS2015 build server
[UPDATE 2/28/2017 — If case you need it, here’s the TFS2017 version of this guide.] With Team Foundation Server 2015, there’s a whole new build system with new build scripts and new build agents (aka. build servers). It’s 100% different from the old XAML-style builds but it’s also about 100% easier to use and set…
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Git Cheat Sheet for TFS Users
More and more of my TFS consulting customers are interested in Git. If you’re used to a centralized version control system like Team Foundation Server Version Control (TFVC), it can be a little tricky to make the move to Git — not because it’s all that hard — mostly because the terminology is completely different. So,…