Latest articles

  • 4 metrics to measure DevOps improvements

    This week I wrote on the Nonlinear Digital blog a piece on DevOps metrics. The goal was to give organization’s 4 easy metrics that they can track to see whether or not the changes they are making to their tools and processes are improving their overall flow through development and operations teams. Unfortunately, I find we… Read more

  • Using TDS with Visual Studio Online build server

    Recently I needed to get builds running in Visual Studio Online (VSO) that contained Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects. Since I cannot install the TDS software on the VSO build server, I needed another way to get these projects to compile with a VSO build definition. The following blog post has very detailed instructions on how… Read more

  • Keystone: Considerations when upgrading to Sitecore 7.5 or Sitecore 8

    With the releases of Sitecore 7.5 and Sitecore 8 in the last 6 months, there has been a lot of interest from clients in upgrading from their current 6.x versions to the latest and greatest Sitecore platform version. This upgrade process always entails an examination of the modules involved in a solution. Keystone for Sitecore is… Read more

  • TDS project compile error: .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found

    TDS project compile error: .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found

    I was recently working on some deployments that leveraged Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects and began receiving the following error on the build server: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\amd64\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets (990): .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found. In order to target “.NETFramework,Version=v2.0”, .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 or later must be installed. Local compilation… Read more

  • Why is DevOps so hard?

    Why is DevOps so hard?

    With agile development teams delivering potentially shippable software every few weeks, organizations struggle with the need to efficiently transition requirements, source code, and deployment steps from the development team to the operations team. Traditional documentation-oriented mechanisms cannot be efficiently kept up to date due to the ever-shifting nature of continuously evolving software. Enter the DevOps movement!… Read more

  • Sitecore announces 2015 MVPs

    I’ve been taking some time off the last few weeks and when I returned to work this week I was happy to see that Sitecore had announced the 2015 MVPS! I was also happy to see my name on the list for the second year in a row! You can see the full list of… Read more