I had the incredible opportunity to attend BUILD 2016 this year. Actually EBSCO sent four of us and we learned a lot! There were so many good keynotes and sessions. The great part is even if you couldn’t attend in person, every keynote/session was live streamed on Channel9 and now all the recordings are available. …
BUILD 2016 Recap & Highlights for ASP.NET Developers Read More »
A common mistake I see (and often still make myself) is publishing the parameterization files with your web application. Visual Studio marks the file’s Build Action property to Content by default when you add a new XML file. This means it will be deployed in your application just like any other HTML file would be. …
WebDeploy Parameterization Tip: Dont publish your Parameterization Files Read More »
I saw a question on Twitter about using the new Release Management functionality in VSTS to deploy virtual applications to Azure websites. After some research I found the Azure Web App Deployment task uses the Publish-AzureWebSiteProject PowerShell cmdlet which does not support deployment of virtual applications. This is also confirmed by this issue on the …
VSTS Release: Custom Deploy Task to Deploy Virtual Applications to Azure Read More »
In this blog post we will deploy a console app using MSDeploy. We use a similiar approach at EBSCO to deploy Scheduled Tasks and Windows Services. Step 1: Extending MSBuild The setup for this follows the same pattern we used in the Deploying a Databased Project with MSDeploy to extend MSBuild by adding a targets …
Do you know all the options available to use in the “Test Filter criteria” on the Visual Studio Test task? I didn’t but it sounded powerful so I did the research and am sharing it here. A Bing search will have plenty of StackOverflow and blog posts about using Test Categories to filter by: Surely …
VSTS/TFS Visual STudio Test Task – Filter Criteria Read More »
I mentioned service versioning briefly in my Are you Release Ready? post two weeks ago as one of the ways you can avoid breaking existing customers of a web service. Many developers assume we have an elaborate and complex service versioning system. We do not. Its very simple, we add a new application under an …
I recently answered a question on StackOverflow about altering a WebDeploy package which spawned the idea for this post. Most developers consider WebDeploy to be nothing short of magic and have no real understanding of its inner workings. To be honest, I still don’t feel like I have a “full” understanding of WebDeploy but I …
Assume for a moment I could give you “DevOps in a Box” and you could start delivering via an orchestration release system in an automated, repeatable way today. Would you be ready for it? What would you have to change in your teams to use it effectively? I bet your teams would be only slightly …
Last year I blogged about how we use MSDeploy in our development group at EBSCO to deploy not just web applications but also Windows services, scheduled tasks and SQL databases. EXTENDING MSDEPLOY BEYOND THE WEB As a followup to that post I will be blogging a series of posts (grouped with the tag “msdeployallthethings”) that …
What is worse than having no unit tests? Answer: Having unit tests that don’t fail when they are supposed to. Unit testing is hard, I know. Especially for new developers. But forcing them to unit test just to say “we have unit tested” may cause more harm than good. If they don’t take the time …