Tag: alm
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Are you ready for the MongoDB 3.4 EOL?
If you are running Sitecore version 8.2.x, you are running MongoDB 3.4. Unfortunately, that also means you are impacted by the announcement by MongoDB that version 3.4 will reach end-of-life in January 2020. You have some options on how you want to fix this and it sort of depends on…
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New Microsoft Planner Due Date Notifications
A short while ago I wrote about our team’s initial adoption of Microsoft Planner. At the time, we were having issues with the due dates feature because there seemed to be no way to view our schedule. A few months later, we ran into another issue with due dates. The…
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Microsoft Planner – The task tracker we deserve
For years, I have been a dedicated user of Trello as you may have seen in some blog posts. Recently, however, my team has been using O365 and Microsoft Teams in an effort to push Teams to its limit and get the most out of the integrations Microsoft has put…
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Trello acquired by Atlassian
If you use Trello (and there are more than 19 million of us that do) you have probably heard about the acquisition of Trello by Atlassian. While Trello will essentially still be what it is today, the team behind Trello now has some serious R&D backing. As somebody who uses the…
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Eleventh day of Christmas… Blogs A-Plenty!
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… eleven re-blogged posts! …ten women of Sitecore, nine sessions of training, eight tweets a-tweeting, seven VSTS features, six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. As a fun twist, each post has…
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Seventh day of Christmas… VSTS features in 2016
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… seven Team Services features! …six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. If you have been using Visual Studio Team Services, you know that Microsoft regularly releases new functionality to…
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Third day of Christmas… Maturity Models!
On the third day of Christmas my true blog gave to me… three maturity models! .. two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Customer Experience Maturity Model Sitecore released a maturity model a while back to guide organizations through the various stages of engaging a customer. Great for seeing…
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On the first day of Christmas… Sitecore in a NuGet Feed
On the first day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Sitecore in a NuGet feed! One of the great things announced this year was the Sitecore public NuGet feed for Sitecore DLLs. This really makes managing Sitecore dependencies on a project a lot easier and makes life deploying…
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VSTS and Sitecore NuGet feeds
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! When you are setting up your Continuous Integration build definition in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) you will get a NuGet Restore step…
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Sitecore Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! Do you need to secure 14 signatures and present technical documentation just to run a script on your production database? Does it take a group of enterprise…
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Corello brings dashboards to your Trello life
A while back, Corello came across my desk as something to look into for reporting on Trello boards. It took me some time to finally get around to it, but I’m glad I finally did. If you use Trello at any scale, you have probably hit the limits of your…
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Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition
It is very fashionable to apply a single word to pretty much ANYTHING to try to get in on the latest trend. The current ‘Whatever-Ops’ trend (MarketingOps, ChatOps, OpsOps) is one such example. For a while, though, we’ve been having the word ‘Continuous’ thrown in front of a whole lot…
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TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument
While investigating options for deploying Sitecore to Azure, I found a TeamCity deploy plugin that supported FTP (among other things). Unfortunately, after trying to get it up and running I ran into the following 501 error while using FTPES (explicit FTPS): “Failed to upload artifacts via FTP. Reply was: 501…
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Fifth Day of Christmas… Five Golden Rules
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Today I offer you some best DevOps practices for your delivery team. Do, or do not. There is no…
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Fourth Day of Christmas… Continuous Integration tools!
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. We all love checking out tools, so here are four Continuous Integration applications you can put under your tree this Christmas!
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Third day of Christmas… Powershell Scripts!
On the third day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Let’s unwrap those scripts!
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Can I have my DevOps Fluffy with a side of Culture?
Wednesday afternoon, while at the DevOps East Conference, I attended a Continuous Integration (CI) session delivered by Chris Riley (@HoardingInfo). Chris was sharing his past experiences with CI and how to best roll it out to all types of organizations. I particularly liked his suggestion of putting the QA team front and center,…
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Sitecore DevOps: Scaling content deployments
When a solution is in operational support, handling ongoing changes in the Sitecore database can be challenging. System admins and content marketers need to be able to make changes in production authoring, the maintenance team needs to make quick fixes through all environments, and the development team needs to be…
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Automate your server updates with OPAS and get some sleep at night
This week I got to see a demo of Infront’s Orchestrated Patch Automation Solution (OPAS). The software promises to automate away all the manual steps that operational staff need to perform to update servers and then validate that they are healthy after the update. This could put an end to…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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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…
St-Cyr Thoughts 