I found a great resource for free ebooks from Microsoft.
Go see for yourself : http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks
I have been delving into Azure Pack and DSC recently and this helped a great deal…
The TFS Build environment can be a bit complex with a couple of things playing on each other. Let's see how everything fits together.
Let's start with the basic build… When you install TFS, and you "Configure Build" using the TFS Admin console, you are in fact setting up 3 components. The build service, controller and as many agents as you may need.
The build service is a communication mechanism between TFS and the build components. You need to have a service running on every build machine, whether or not that machine only has agents or contains a build controller and agents. The controller (as its name implies) controls the agents and manages which builds are being handed off to which agents. Finally, the agents preform the work.
The controller and or the agents can run on separate machines. So you could have an instance where TFS in on Serv1, the controller and potentially one agent is on Serv2 and another 2 agents are on Serv3. One thing to note is that a TFS Project Collection can have multiple controllers associated to it, but a controller can only service one project collection. You can also only have one controller installed on a machine.
You may also be tempted to have multiple controllers to a team project collection, but in most cases you should only require one controller and then a number of agents spread across multiple machines.
Lab Management brings with it a bunch of additional resources and components. More specifically it has its own Test Controller and Test Agents.
You would use test controllers and agents when you want to "run tests remotely, distribute tests across multiple machines or run load tests".
Unlike the test agents in the previous section, you would only have a single test agent deployed on a machine. These components form part of the BDT (Build, Deploy and Test) workflow.
The new kid on the block, Release Management, leverages the default build to obtain compiled artefacts. In fact it has a custom build template that actually instantiates a release pipeline in Release Management.
So to recap, TFS has the primary build (Team Build) infrastructure that consist of a build controller and build agents. This is used to compile and do initial tests on the code that is in version control. Then Lab Management with its test controllers and test agents takes this a step further and allows some deployment workflows and once again adds test capabilities.
January 23rd 2014 saw the launch of ALM days SA in Cape Town.
This event was organised and sponsored by Team Foundation Consulting, South Africa’s only consultancy focussed solely on ALM, TFS and Visual Studio.
Attendees came to learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which enable software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively.
The event aimed to provide insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure that the final application meets the needs and expectations of users
A HUGE thank you to all who attended and participated in the first ALM days!!
We had a lively crowd of about 40 people, all of whom chose to spend their day learning something new.
Some of the positive feedback from those who attended…
“Broad coverage of topics, well done”
“Keynote was excellent, Agile was interesting, looking at new tools & features was great…”
“Great presentations, very informative. Awesome keynote…”
“…Lunch awesome & venue great. Thank you for taking the initiative of organising this day. Much appreciated.”
“Would be nice to see this every year.”
“Nice mix of topics – technical & theoretical.”
“Good speakers, good content, good location, learned a lot.”
“Hope you host TechDays 14.”
“Great food!”
Thank you to all our SPEAKERS who helped to make this event possible!
Roderick Lim Banda, our Keynote speaker, set the tone for the day and got everyone thinking about the future of IT and the people who are involved in the industry.
”Awesome keynote…” “Enjoyed Roderick’s views on CPT IT industry.” “Keynote was excellent…”
Cara Turner gave us some insight into a real world business situation where Agile proved invaluable.
Daniel van Wyk showed us how to incorporate SQL in the development process.
Dawie Snyman showed us a few of the cool features in TFS 2013.
Niel Zeeman provided insight on how to incorporate Quality Management & Enablement in day-to-day processes. He also showed us what is possible when it comes to Continuous Deployment as a key concept in Velocity Culture and how it all comes together.
A special thank you to Ahmed & Michelle from Microsoft SA who kindly organised the Visual Studio 2013 info sheets as well as the 2 books and Visual Studio USB’s which were given out to participants
At Team Foundation Consulting, we saw the need to have
an ALM event where developers and members of the IT community could share experiences, learn new concepts, have access to experts and engage with likeminded individuals.
Judging from the feedback from those who attended…we were right!
We are proud to have launched ALM days, and we look forward to making the next one even better!
We are currently in the process of gathering slides and will make them available on the ALM days site. Keep an eye out for updates either on http://www.alm-days.co.za , or on this blog.
I recently completed the ALM exam. This was my first Microsoft exam and I was apprehensive about doing it. I passed (Yay!) and decided to follow Niel’s example and write down what I think would help preparing for and completing it successfully.
I think the starting point and source of ALM is the Agile Manifesto and principles behind it. This is at the heart of ALM and this exam, and can be referred to with almost every question.
The next valuable resource is the scrum guide. A substantial part of the exam is about scrum in TFS so know and understand it. Reading “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. This is a fabulous resource on scrum with TFS and would get most developers excited about the prospect of working in a high functioning scrum team.
Then last, but not least go to Microsoft Virtual Academy and work through their Applying ALM with Visual Studio. Watch the videos and do the questions at the end.
Use TFS! Set up a few projects, play with it and familiarise yourself with the templates.
When you sit for the exam make sure you read the questions properly. There are several that you can pass by process of elimination. Watch out for small clues like backlog item vs. requirement vs. stories.
Good luck with your exam!
ALM days Cape Town is happening on 23 January 2014!
Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town on 23rd January 2014!
Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively. This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.
Reserve your seat today!
Find out more at www.alm-days.co.za
The event is free and seats are limited.
Join us for an awesome day of ALM!
Finally, the time has come for us to launch the first ALM days in South Africa.
Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town in January 2014!
Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively.
This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.
The event is free and seats are limited.
Date, venue and agenda to be confirmed soon.
Cape Town Event
If you are interested, sign up on www.alm-days.co.za and be first to be notified once all the details have been finalised.
We look forward to you joining us for a day focussed on Application Lifecycle Management.
Learn – Discuss – Question – Engage
Meet new & interesting people…
I have been an avid consumer of the ALM Rangers artifacts, articles and applications for a long time now.
Who are the Rangers:
“The Visual Studio ALM Rangers accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for feature gaps and value-add guidance for the ALM community.”
Some of the cool “stuff” that you should have seen before:
And finally I will be on the other side of the fence 
I have had a couple people asking me “where are the build templates in TFS 2013?”.
Well they have been removed!
Don’t worry, they are still available though 
…
By default, they are now simply stored in TFS and not in the repository.
When creating a build definition you will notice that the default build templates can simply be selected (as per usual).
When you need to use a custom template, or modify the existing templates you can simple download the template,
make your changes and then upload the updated build template to the repository as per normal.
Microsoft has reworked things in the build templates, simplifying it quite a lot. Hopefully altering your build processes will no longer be such a daunting task!
Finally! It felt really odd not having the trusted power tools available when working in VS / TFS 2013 
Some big news!! The release candidate for VS & TFS 2013 was released last night.
There are a couple of really nice features added since the preview. One of my favourites is the charting ability for work items. I have done quite a few custom TFS reports, and even though this may reduce the number of jobs that I have, it is VERY cool nonetheless…
The list of things that have been added is fairly large, hopefully I will blog about it in the future.
Note that this does have a “go-live” license, so Microsoft will provide support if you decide to be an early adopter and upgrade your production environments.
Feel free to contact us if you need more information around upgrade options...
I finally got the time to go and write the “Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management” exam.
I was quite nervous about this one, as it has been a while since I have written any form of exam and because it is very “non technical” focussed. These “fuzzy” questions can often be very misleading.
Luckily I passed, fairly well actually, so I thought I would jot down some of my crib notes..
Especially the terminology and the artefacts that are included in the different process templates. The questions are almost a matter of disqualifying the incorrect answers and then you are left with what can only be the correct ones.
Especially scrum! The scrum guide is a fairly concise guide and small enough to read in one sitting (even for me!), so there is no real reason not to work through it in any case.
Once again, have a good grasp of the CMMI, Agile and Scrum terminology, artefacts and processes.
I really recommend “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. Even if you are not going to take the exam, a very good read indeed.
Have a look online, there are a lot of brain dumps available for this exam. I would take a look at the questions, but really scrutinise the answers. I looked over a couple and there are definitely plenty of wrong answers provided to the questions. Just be careful and don't learn the answers of by heart!
Yes, there is actually a free jumpstart for this exam. Definitely worth spending some time on.
Done and dusted! 
Good luck if you are going to give it a go.
Let me give you a hint: Not only is it faster, it’s also more reliable! (There, blog post done : )
Let me expand on the above:
It’s fast!
Seriously, a lot faster.
Anybody that’s ever had to sit and pay VSS tax while dreaming of your post work beer, waiting for a history lookup, a search, or especially “View difference” would know what I mean.
There is a great difference in architecture between the two. I’ll discuss a few to give you an idea of why you should consider moving.
Storage:
TFS Uses a SQL database to store Team Project Collections; VSS uses a File System. So how is this better?
· Size – (Yes it does matter) VSS can store up to 4GB reliably; TFS can go into Terabytes
· Reliable – Ever had a network error when checking in on VSS? You’re left with corrupt files and a caffeine overdose. TFS commits a transaction which can be rolled back if there is an error
· Indexing on the tables so faster searches – Did I mention TFS is faster?
· And of course, having a DB as your data store, you can have all the usual goodies like mirrored and clustered DB’s for TFS, so you never have to lose anything or have any down time!
Networking:
TFS uses HTTP services vs. file shares (That should be enough said)
· Option of a TFS proxy for remote sites to save bandwidth and speed things up a little
· Did I mention that TFS is faster?
Security:
TFS uses Windows Role-Based Security vs. VSS security (I don’t think the methodology was good enough for someone to even come up with a name for it – I’ll just call it Stup-Id, there we go, you’re welcome ;)
Windows Role-Based Security vs. VSS’s Stup-Id:
· With Win Roles you can specify who’s allowed to view, check-out, check-in and lots more. With Stup-Id you can set rights per project, but all users must have the same rights for the database folder. This means all users can access and completely muck up the shared folders. Not pretty.
Extra functionality and pure awesomeness:
· Shelve sets – this is really handy to store code if you don’t want to commit it just yet. Say you go for lunch and you’re afraid that BigDog might chew up your hard drive again: all you do is shelve your code – this stores it in TFS. Once you’ve replaced said eaten hard drive you just unshelve and... tada! No need to say the dog ate my homework.
· Code review – Developer A can request a code review from another developer who can add comments to the code and send it back. (Basically sharing a shelve set)
· Gated check-ins: You can set rules to only allow check-ins when certain conditions have been met. For example, only check in code when:
o the code builds successfully, or
o all unit tests have passed, or
o the code has been reviewed
· Work Items – Bug/issue tracking made with love removes that nagging feeling at the back of your mind that one of these days there will be a PHP or MySQL update that breaks your free open source ticketing/bug tracking system.
· Change sets – basically all the items that you’ve changed and are checking in. You can also associate change sets with work items for better issue tracking.
· Build automation – automate build and deploys (How cool is this?)
But for me the Pièce de résistance is:
Have you ever had a new developer change files outside of the IDE? Maybe change the read-only attribute and made some changes? This completely confuses VSS and is a great way to get your source control out of sync. In TFS you can edit files outside of the IDE to hearts content and TFS will pick it up and queue for the next commit.
How to move?
Google “Visual Source Safe Upgrade Tool for Team Foundation Server” and follow the instructions.
And that is why TFS will make you happy. Better source control means better code quality, leading to happy customers, and maybe being the next Bill Gates (unless you wanted to be Guy Fawkes).
Welcome Dawie...the TFS Apprentice
Having joined TFC at the beginning of July 2013, Dawie Snyman has the un-enviable challenge of having to become an expert in all things ALM and TFS.
Like many of my clients, TFS is completely foreign to him!
Dawie will be contributing to our blog, offering up a new perspective on TFS... that of the 'first time user'.
Looking forward to his insights…
See his first post over here..
In the previous post I was discussing how one could go about packaging software to make the long journey from development into production.
In this post I will take a brief look at a couple of tools or applications that I have come across, to take those packages and automate their deployment. Using them will lower the friction and reduce the reliance on human (and possibly problematic) intervention.
Once again, we all know that continuous integration is a “basic right” when it comes to development environments, but it does not need to be limited to development environments. If you are using one of the numerous CI environments, extending it to deploy the packages in the previous post should be fairly simple.
I have done this a couple of times to varying degrees of complexity in TFS. It is possible to alter the Build Template to do pretty much anything you require. Setting up default deployment mechanisms and then by simply changing a few parameters, you can point it to different environments.
I have done everything from database deployments, remote msi installations to SharePoint deployments using just the TFS Build to do all the work.
You must have heard by now, a very exiting acquisition from Microsoft was the InRelease application from inCycle. This basically extends TFS Build and adds a deployment workflow. It takes the build output (which could be anything that was discussed in the previous post) and, once again, kicks off a WorkFlow that includes everything from environment configuration to authorisation of deployment steps.
In SAP they speak of “Transports” between environments, and this, in my mind, speaks to the same idea of transporting the package into different environment.
I’m really excited about this, and I can already see a couple of my clients making extensive use of it.
Another deployment focussed package that I have been following is Octopus Deploy (OD). OD works on the same premise as InRelease, having agents/deployers/tentacles in the deployment environment that “does the actual work”.
A key differentiator is that OD sources updates etc. from NuGet feeds, so you need to package your deliverables and then post them to a NuGet server. As I explained in the previous post, NuGet is a very capable platform, and with a number of free NuGet servers around, you can very easily create your “private” environment for package deployment.
Do not forget System Center, or more specifically System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). SCCM is a great way to push or deploy applications (generally MSI’s) to different servers or environments. Very capable in its own right, and more importantly (assuming you have packaged the software properly) can be setup, configured and managed by the ops team.
