Category: DevOps and ALM
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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…
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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…
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Visual Studio Online agile options are opening up
Recently, Aaron Bjork wrote about some of the goodies coming down the pipe for Visual Studio Online (VSO) agile project management options. I still remember my first forays into TFS 2010, trying desperately to use it to manage my agile projects. Needless to say, I was frustrated at the time, but…
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Why you don’t care that .NET is now open source
Back in November, Microsoft made a large announcement that they would be open sourcing the .NET server stack. There were many a Twitter tweet and blog rumblings a-plenty. I’m sure cake was cut, beverages were gulped, and celebratory snacks served to many a happy developer. Yet, amongst the revelry, myself…
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TeamCity PowerShell scripts run with “- File” always return exit code zero
Are you finding that your TeamCity Powershell scripts are always returning exit code zero (a success) no matter what happens? Even when an exception is thrown and you can see the error message in your build log? I ran into this problem recently while moving some of my Powershell scripts…
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Visual Studio Online and Azure deployment
This past Tuesday I attended a Webinar led by ALM Ranger and Microsoft MVP Esteban Garcia (@EstebanFGarcia). The topic? Azure and Visual Studio Online (VSO), specifically around deployments (or so I thought). There was more content in this session than I expected to get, that’s for sure! My primary goal in…
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Visual Studio Online Stakeholder licensing is live
A few weeks back, I mentioned that Visual Studio Online was making some licensing changes to better integrate the greater project team into the tool, and the Stakeholder licensing changes have been announced as live this past week. Of course this happened while I was away on vacation!
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Don’t Fight The Framework Pt V – Sitecore’s built on Sitecore so build your site on Sitecore.
Originally posted on CardinalCore: This one will be a relatively quick one ( hopefully before the girlfriend finds out I am working on our holiday 😉 ). Continuing on in the Don’t Fight The Framework series, I thought I would discuss a topic that has kind of formed the more…
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Upcoming VS Online licensing changes greatly helping Microsoft’s position
Last week, Brian Harry announced on his blog some upcoming changes to the Visual Studio Online licensing. Word is that the changes should be coming in the next few months (an August-like timeframe is mentioned). The announced changes are going to be a great help in positioning Microsoft against some of…
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Visual Studio and Git error: “URI formats are not supported”
Recently, while trying to synchronize with my Visual Studio Online git repository, the Visual Studio Git plugin started displaying the error “URI formats are not supported” while attempting to execute a pull operation. This appears to be an issue introduced with Update 2, and at least from my own experience…
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Using MongoLab to manage your MongoDb instances
If you have been looking at getting into using document-oriented storage, you have probably looked at the variety of NoSQL offerings such as CloudDB, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. These databases are built for scalability, performance, and high availability, tailored for gathering large quantities of data in a reliable manner. My personal preference…
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Federated Identity in Visual Studio Online
This great post by Mitch Denny provides insights into federating Visual Studio Online using Azure Active Directory. The techniques described for enabling the federation without exposing either organization’s internal directories is of great use for consultant/integrator groups who are working with multiple clients and need to protect their information.
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4 ways to change so you can deliver more often
I am a big fan of continuous delivery and deployment. You might have seen me write about it a few times before. When I first bring the idea up with clients, there is hesitation. One might even call it fear. The benefits are huge, allowing you to reap the return on…
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How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
For the last year or so, I’ve been living in a mostly Atlassian world: JIRA OnDemand, BitBucket, SourceTree… likely more before the year is done. Sure, I still use our on-premise TFS 2010 at work along with Visual Studio of various editions, but my ALM world has really been rocked by…
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Getting started with Agile ALM for Sitecore
Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to iteratively improve our own processes at nonlinear to deliver better Sitecore solutions and set our clients up for maintainable and sustainable ALM processes. Some of my posts on automated Sitecore deployments with TFS or TeamCity outlined some of the initial steps we…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Conditional sublayout logic
In a previous post, I discussed handling the continuous deployment of templates and layouts, but mentioned that you also need to worry about conditional business logic in your sublayouts. The primary issue is this: if the data model is constantly in flux and the system is in a state of…
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Making the case for Continuous Deployment
Over on the corporate blog, I’ve tried to make the case for executing continuous deployment for Sitecore solutions. In reality, the concepts apply to any web applications being developed, but the particulars of how you will accomplish it will depend on the technology platforms being used. I’d love to get…
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Sitecore 7: Unit Testing fake indexes with MSTest
I recently posted a prototype solution to our corporate blog showcasing unit testing against Sitecore 7 indexes. I have made a solution available for download to show you how to use MSTEST to execute unit tests against fake indexes in Sitecore 7, and also how to do this without a…
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Cloning issues in JIRA OnDemand using Atlassian SDK
Recently, I wanted to start spinning up new projects in JIRA with some common epics and stories that we see on a lot of our projects. This seemed like a great way to capture some of the best practices and planning items that our teams have gathered over the years…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Templates and Sublayouts
If you have decided to move to a continuous deployment model with your Sitecore solution, you now have several hurdles that you need to overcome to get your solution from development into production without risking the stability of the user experience. One of these is the introduction of new ‘building…
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Tracking hours burndown in Trello
In the past, I’ve written about some tools for doing Scrum inside of Trello, as well as some guidance on creating Scrum boards using these plugins. Recently, I received a question about how to accurately track hours spent in Trello. Zig Mandel, the man behind Plus for Trello and Spent for…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Video presentation from SVUG
I had planned on kicking off a short series on how to tackle the challenges of Sitecore Continuous Deployment, but after I had written my post the Sitecore Virtual User Group (SVUG) held an online Q&A presentation by Jason Bert on Continuous Integration & Deployment. The presentation is a great…
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Git branching model
I haven’t really had the chance to work with Git much over the years, other than creating a GitHub account and performing some simple merges on my own projects. For work reasons, however, I’ve been looking into sustainable models for using Git as an enterprise source control for larger, long-running…
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7 Tips for Agile ALM
Jurgen Appelo posted a great slide share a few years back on Agile ALM. While there is a lot of great content in the slideshare, including covering the difference between ALM 1.0 and ALM 2.0, my favourite section is the 7 tips for Agile ALM. These tips provide guidance on…
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Release Management with InRelease
Originally posted on Jasper Gilhuis: In this post I will highlight the latest addition to the Visual Studio product suite, InRelease. This Release Management tool, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, is meant for bridging the gap between Development and Operations by providing a clear, repeatable, automated deployment procedure. This…
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How to set up Trello board for Scrum
In the past, I’ve written about how to use Trello for agile task tracking, and also about some tools that allow you to use Trello for Scrum. Recently I started up a little side project for a personal application I wanted to write, and I decided to run the project…
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Preparing for success on your next website launch
I recently blogged over on Nonlinear Thinking about the 9 steps to a successful Sitecore website launch. While targeted at a Sitecore audience, these steps do apply to pretty much any website launch. So, if you are about to plan the site launch for your most recent project, putting together…
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Sitecore: Taking on the Top 10 Reasons to A/B test
The practice of A/B testing follows the Lean methodology of Build, Measure, and Learn (BML). By using tools capable of performing these tests, we can build a quick test, measure the interaction with the tests, and learn from the results gathered. This is fundamental to improving your content and your…
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TDS: Deploy failed – “This software is protected to provide copy protection”
Have you encountered a failure while executing an automated Sitecore deployment with TDS where the type initializer throws an exception and you are asked to reinstall the TDS application? Apparently, if your TDS installation becomes corrupted somehow, you need to get rid of the web service and let TDS reinstall…
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A starters guide to Git for TFS GitWits…
Originally posted on The Road to ALM: When I started my development career way back in 1999, the first Source Control System I ever used was Visual SourceSafe. After a few years I switched to SVN for a while and I liked that. The, in 2005 came Team Foundation Server…
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TDS deployments slow with Sitecore 6.6? Upgrade versions!
Have your deployments to Sitecore 6.6 installations been taking a very long time? Do your build logs show 3-4 seconds for every template item that is deployed? Are you seeing the following warning in Sitecore logs? All caches have been cleared. This can decrease performance considerably. If so, you are…
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Microsoft completes acquisition of InRelease software
While I was at the ALM Summit in January, Claude from InCycle (now with Microsoft) was doing demos of their InRelease software. The deployment software allowed for a massive amount of deployment configuration, moving a build between labs and retaining environment-specific configurations using a tokenized language. The workflow definition for…
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Using Trello for Scrum
A lot of the traffic that comes through this blog is related to folks looking to use Trello for agile development. If you are using a Kanban/Lean approach, it works really well out of the box. However, if you are using a more Scrum-like approach, you may have noticed the…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Two: Measure It
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, and now we continue on our travel through the road map with measuring…
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TFS as perfect tool for Scrum (Part 1) – Introduction in Scrum and TFS
Originally posted on The Road to ALM: This year I was invited again to present at Microsoft TechDays. This event is held every year in the World Forum in The Hague. This year I spoke about why TFS is the perfect tool for Scrum. My session was about how to…
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Setting up a simple countdown to launch date
For all of my projects, there comes a point in time where we start winding down towards launch and the team begins watching the calendar very closely. This can be both a stressful and exciting time, but I feel that having a little bit of celebration around this is something…
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4 reasons why agile teams should stage deployments each iteration
There are a few shops like Etsy that use continuous deployment/delivery to have code go straight into production, but otherwise the rest of us have some sort of environment between the developer’s machine and the live production environment. Some call this Staging or QA, or there may actually be MANY…
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Free Agile Task Tracking with Trello
There are a ridiculous number of tools out there to help track tasks, but of all of them, Trello has been my favourite for cheap agile task tracking. It’s has no cost, unlimited boards, real-time collaboration, and a UI so intuitive it makes adoption across the team dead simple. First…
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Profiling Integration Performance on a Tight Budget
Application performance is heavily dependent on the performance of the communications between the primary application and all other integrated systems. Even the tiniest of changes in a connected system can suddenly cause a huge performance hit. For example, a small web service retrieving data about a user when they log…
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Dungeons and Dragons TFS Process Template
There was no way that I could resist downloading the D&D process template posted by the TFS product team on their blog. I absolutely NEEDED to see what had been done inside here. The blog post was very bare on the details, but it seems that with a few configuration changes…
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TDS: So you’re deploying Sitecore to a new environment…
If you’ve been using TDS to do automated deployments for Sitecore, you’ll eventually need to start deploying to a new environment. Maybe you’ve set up your local environment, and now you want to get that process working in a daily build environment. Maybe you want to automate deployment to a…
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ALM Summit Videos now posted
For those of you that have been following my series on the ALM sessions at the end of January in Redmond, Microsoft has posted the videos from the summit over on Channel9. I’ve updated my own posts to include video links, so if you prefer to read through the posts…
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Integration Testing with Unit Tests and MSTest
In many of the projects that I have worked on, the application we’re building needs to integrate with a back-end system or a web service layer that is maintained by a third party or by another team. In these cases, we shouldn’t assume we’ll have the ability to ensure that…
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ALM Summit: Day Three
The conference is all done, and I’m finally home from Seattle wishing there was more, but also really wanting to get back into the office and share what I’ve learned. I met some incredible people this week, and had some great conversations around the breakfast table, over beers, and in…
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ALM Summit: Day Two
Wow, day two is in the books… where to start? Well, maybe I’ll start at the end: Free beer and buffet for over 3 hours definitely provided a nice finish to the end of the day. I didn’t network the way I imagine I was probably supposed to: milling around the room…
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ALM Summit: Day One
I’ve never been to a conference like this before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The conference kicked off Tuesday at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, which is a beautiful building, even if I’ve only seen the conference rooms on the bottom floor so far 🙂 The start-time for registration…
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Automating Sitecore Deployments with TFS and TDS
During development, your team makes a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements that need to be tracked, verified, and deployed. You need a way to source control those database changes, and then make them available to your team to test. Here’s how to accomplish…
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Automating Sitecore Deployments with TeamCity and TDS
During development, your team makes a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements that need to be tracked, verified, and deployed. You need a way to source control those database changes, and then make them available to your team to test. Here’s how to accomplish…
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Source-controlling Sitecore: TDS Project Configuration Basics
Your Sitecore content changes are just as important as the code you are writing for your solution, and that means you should be tracking those changes in source control. Your team will be making a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements for which you…
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Managing the Agile Process
Aaron Bjork made a great presentation at ALM Summit 2011. I’ll be providing my insights into using TFS 2012 on projects in some upcoming posts, but I think Aaron did an awesome job of explaining some of the agile management issues, as well as showcasing some of the new features…
St-Cyr Thoughts 