5 Key takeaways in Application Release Automation (ARA)

You might have already come across this acronym; ARA (Application Release Automation). As part of DevOps practices, this is not only the process of automating the actual installation of an application (landscape), but also involves moving the application through the deployment pipeline (e.g. dev > test > acc > prod).

Connect(); 2015 Twitter timeline

Find all of my tweets published during the keynote sessions of Microsoft Connect(); event on November 18th, 2015.

Creating a Service Endpoint in Visual Studio Online fails with “User does not have required permissions for the service endpoint”

Today I was adding another (generic) Service Endpoint to Visual Studio Online in order to integrate one of our Team Projects with SonarQube. This Service Endpoint is the link that describes how the Build should connect to SonarQube. While creating it I got an error “User does not have required permissions for the service endpoint”

Upgrading SonarQube from 5.1.2 to 5.2

Today I upgraded our companies’ SonarQube instance from 5.1.2 to version 5.2. We run it on an Azure VM and it is connected to our Visual Studio Online instance.

Delta-N Visual Studio 2015 Launch event slidedeck

At my employer, Delta-N, we organized two events related to the launch of Visual Studio 2015 and Team Foundation Server 2015. In this second event I spoke about moving from on-premise TFS to Visual Studio Online. The slidedeck is in Dutch and you can download it HERE.

Epic news in the Microsoft ALM corner

Yesterday and today some big news was quite silently launched and published on the VS ALM blog which I’d like to share, because I think these kind of changes will make a huge difference in the daily life of software producing companies;

Microsoft Techdays 2015 – Azure Deployment Pipeline in 25 minutes

This year I’m a speaker at the Dutch Microsoft TechDays conference. I have two sessions (of 25 mins each) in which I talk about DevOps related topics.

The blogpost about the first session can be found here.

In this second session I show the audience that in a short amount of time and with very little effort, a deployment pipeline can be setup only using Azure VM’s, Visual Studio Online and Microsoft Release Management (connected to Visual Studio Online). Even one of the two Azure VM’s I need are created during the session.

SDN June 2014 conference slidedeck – Be productive with Visual Studio Online in 30 minutes

This year -again- I presented at the (Dutch) SDN conference. Thanks to the visitors of my session!

The slidedeck of the session can be downloaded HERE. From this slidedeck, only a small part of the information provided in the session is visible. I did some nice demos on creating a build and publishing it to an Azure website within a few clicks.

Team Foundation Service (TFS On Azure) considerations

UPDATE! With the launch of Visual Studio 2013 some of the information in the post below has been updated!

With the Visual Studio Online (TFS in the cloud aka Team Foundation Service aka tfspreview.com) now out of preview (as per the 31st of October), it is time to make some considerations.

• Is a transition to the Azure environment for ALM repositories a do or don’t?
• What are the pro’s and con’s?

Out of my own experience I would like to share my opinions and some facts;