Kalabule or a Professional at Agile in Africa
I have been honoured by being asked to speak at Agile in Africa today on the topic of Kalabule or a Professional at Agile in Africa . I was a little disappointed when Nana asked me, as I had already booked a customer on those dates in Houston, Texas. Nana asked if I could do remote, so I could attend anyway :). This is my second presentation at Agile In Africa, and it sounds like this years event is just as awesome as the last.
VSTS Sync Migration Tools
I have been working with a number of customers in the last year that want to move to VSTS. While many of them want to do the full Collection import, many do not.
Scaling Professional Scrum with Visual Studio Team Services
Last week I was teaching a Professional Scrum Foundations in Farnborough and I had to make sure that I got a hotel with awesome internet access. As well as teaching the class I Have two additional tasks for the week. The first was to have the honour of talking on ScrumPulse, Scrum.org’s webcast, and the second was to talk at the prestigious Dutch ALM Meetup.
Open-source with VSTS or TFS and Github for better DevOps
I have had quite a few requests from folks that want to use the full capabilities of VSTS or TFS but really need to have the code published in Github as it is Open-Source. Well I build a few Open-Source projects and I want to have my cake and eat it too.. I want to be able to use the full power of VSTS to reduce the friction of doing Agility and DevOps, but I want to publish the code and output to Github for public consumption. As Github really is the only place to store OSS software we need to figure out how to handle that.
Migrating from Codeplex to Github
I have a repository on Codeplex that was the result of the code that I had to write to move my blog from GeeksWithBlogs many moons ago over to Wordpress. This was a very difficult process and recently quite a few of my friends have had to go through it as well. Since GeeksWithBlogs has been sold to ’the man’ many bugs have crept into the system and features are sparse. With the most recent request for access I decided it was time to ditch Codeplex and move to Github. If you have not seen the writing on the wall yet the only Open Source host of any note is GitHub. All my private repositories are in VSTS ( http://tfs.visualstudio.com ) but anything Open Source will be moved to GitHub.
Mapping your Windows Special Folders to OneDrive for Business - Ultimate Backup
Do you worry that you will lose files on your computer? Well you should! At any time your harddrive can fail, or your house could be hit by a meteor, or stolen. I keep everything on my computer encrypted with BitLocker and can remote wipe any of my data, however I want to be able to access it from anywhere. Everything needs to be in at least two locations to be called a backup, a local separate disk is only partial backup and realis on being at home to backup leading to stale data. That means that the only viable place to securely store your data is the cloud.
Moving OneDrive for Business files to a different drive
I recent ran into a problem where my OneDrive files were taking up too much space on my main drive and preventing Windows 10 updates on the Insider Program. This works for both OneDrive consumer application and the new OnDrive for Business beta application.
Agile in Africa 2016
When someone comes to you with an opportunity in the developing world you better have a good reason to say no. For the last few years Nana Abana had been trying to achieve the impossible, conduct a high profile Agile event in West Africa. It’s not just the holding of the event that seemed impossible, but getting together a group of people that can really bring agility to Africa. Up until now many of the endeavours into agility in west africa have been pushed by sharlotons that are intent only in profiting from Africa and not improving development practices. Making money and not helping people. It is posible to do both, but you will need to invest up front to get there.
Branch Policies for TFVC
I have been working with a large customer in Norway that is moving to TFS whole sale and also needs to continue using a server based source control system for the time being. It would be awesome for them to be able to move to Git, however the codebase is currently incompatible. Work is ongoing to remove this issue, and many components will be able to move as soon as we can add Git repositories to a TFVC Team Project (in TFS 2015 Update 1). SO in the mean time we need a way to apply policies to particular branches.
Professional Scrum Courses for 2016 in Oslo, Norway
Just before the end of the year I taught my first Professional Scrum Master course in Norway and it was a resounding success. We had 30 students from some of the largest and most successful companies in Norway. The feedback was incredible and I had an awesome time teaching it.
Access denied for orchestration plan on Build
I was trying to setup a Build Agent within one of my current customers. They do over 1 million builds a year through Team City and I need to demonstrate that the new TFS build system is awesome before they will consider it. So it never instils confidence when you get an error…
The High of Release
Just a week or so ago I was at Microsoft Future Decoded event in London to talk about the new Release Management tools that will be made available at Connect() and that might make it in to TFS 2015 Update 2. Here is hoping! The focus of the track was on DevOps and the focus of my session was on both Build and Release.
Big Scrum: All you need and not enough
I was in Norway for NDC Oslo 2015 and I was there to talk about “Big Scrum: All you need and not enough” which is a kind of oxymoron as it really is enough, you just need to apply the values and principals at scale. I tried to cover what for me is a total 100% requirement for Scale.
Big Scrum: Are you doing mechanical Scrum
Last month I created an article for NDC Magazine on Scaling Scrum. The guys at NDC must have liked it as they decided to put it on the cover. This article is a discussion and investigation into what it means to be a Professional Scrum Team, why we need it, and how we can scale it.
Install TFS 2015 today
It has been a while since I had to install, configure, or upgrade TFS. Most of my customers have been moving to Visual Studio Online (VSO) which is effectively TFS in the cloud, and that requires “migration” of data rather than “upgrade”. Although there are great reasons to pick VSO over TFS, even for enterprise , many companies have a cultural issue with the cloud and are not ready to go there yet. For this we still have TFS and all of its fantastic features are updated and improved for 2015.
How to rename a Team Project in TFS 2015
By the launch of TFS 2010 we had given up on getting rename in TFS. 5 years of no rename had taken its toll. Now, as a surprise present with TFS 2015 (and on VSO) and I have a bunch of projects to “zz”. Did you know that you should always “zz” something before you delete it. If you delete something then its gone. If you prefix it with “zz” then it falls to the bottom of any list and you can ignore it until later… but if someone complains… you can easily recover it.
Upgrading to TFS 2015 in production - DONE
I am onsite today with a customer in London to do an upgrade of their production system to TFS 2015. We have a backup of the databases and a snapshot of the VM and are good to go.
Unable to load task handler PowerShell for task VSBuild
If you are setting up to run Team Foundation Server’s vNext build system that Microsoft is previewing on VSO you may hit a “Unable to load task handler PowerShell for task VSBuild with version 1.0.1” error when you try to build on Windows Server Technical Preview.
It's that time again; get ready to upgrade to TFS 2015
With the release of Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP you should be starting to plan your upgrade strategy. It’s going to be a tough one but you should get ready to upgrade to TFS 2015 now.
Using the Build vNext capabilities and demands system
Using the Build vNext capabilities and demands in VSO is one of the new cool features of the vNext build system being developed by Microsoft on VSO. Download Team Foundation Server 2015 today Microsoft has released a CTP of TFS 2015 that includes the vNext build system. You can download TFS 2015 and try it out today. Remember that this is not a go-live version and you should not install it in production.
ALM Events and public courses in 2015 Q2
I have had a lot of folks asking for dates of the public courses that I will be running in the next few months. When I moved back from the USA and started consulting I initially alighted at my parents’ house as the house I was in before moving out was still being rented. Well that house was sold and so, for my one day a week visit home between engagements, I have been staying at my parents. I know… I am sure there is a joke in there somewhere. I have been getting many requests for online live ALM training, and unfortunately my parents has had no room to run them.
Create a Build vNext build definition
I am going to show how to create a Build vNext build definition on VSO. Microsoft recently announced the creation of a brand new build system for TFS and VSO at the Connect event last year. This new build system will eventually replace the current one and be much more modular and friendly. Happily I am in the early adopter program and the product team just made an early alfa of the service available for that program and I have been giving it a spin.
My journey into Professional Scrum
It has been just over a year since I returned from 3 years in the USA and started naked ALM Consulting, and things are going well.. So far. The key to success in software development is, I believe, Professional Scrum.
Managing your Azure VM's with your Phone
I have been doing quite a bit of ALM Training recently and have been trying to figure out how best to manage my training VM’s. Download Mobile Azure Manager from US Store
The benefits of Visual Studio Online for the Enterprise
I last posted on why you should use Visual Studio ALM due to a customer ask, and now I have been asked to justify a move to Visual Studio Online for a company looking to use it for about 5,000 people.
Do you need an expert in Visual Studio ALM, TFS, or Scrum?
Due to the decimation of the oil prices one of my larger customers has had to cancel our engagement for February. I am suddenly and surprisingly available in February! I usually have engagements booked out up to 3 months in advance and that makes for some difficult conversations with potential customers that want me onsite within two weeks. I have been trying to limit any one customer to no more than 2 consecutive weeks to mitigate this, but customers can be demanding. I did have an engagement booked in Oslo for February. I was going to be migrating over 20 Team Projects into a single uber Team Project. I was really looking forward to it… then a barrel of oil dropped to below $50…
Could not load file or assembly while configuring Build vNext Agent
If you are using Windows Server 2012 R2 to test out the new vNext build agent then you may run into an error where it could not load file or assembly while configuring Build vNext Agent.
Configure a Build vNext Agent
I am going to show how to configure a Build vNext Agent on VSO. Microsoft recently announced the creation of a brand new build system for TFS and VSO at the Connect event last year. This new build system will eventually replace the current one and be much more modular and friendly. Happily I am in the early adopter program and the product team just made an early alpha of the service available for that program and I have been giving it a spin.
Creating nested teams in Visual Studio ALM
I just got a question on Teams without areas using Team Field in TFS and I decided that it warranted a bigger answer. The question was around creating nested teams and how to achieve it. Now, this applies to both Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server if you are using area path, and only TFS if you are using Team Field.
Why should I use Visual Studio ALM
I see many organisations looking at TFS and trying to make the decision on why should I use Visual Studio ALM. Often you already have some tools and you want to move to TFS, or you have TFS and you are evaluating other tools as part of a reorganisation.
