HOWTO: Check browser type and its version in your VSTS/TFS extensions
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Jul 21, 2017
Ever wanted to check which browser (and browser version) your VSTS/TFS extension is running on? Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services Web Extension SDK has a great set of utility methods. In this blog post we will see couple of such methods which will help us to detect browser type and its version.
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HOWTO: Copy text to clipboard in VSTS/TFS Extensions
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Jul 19, 2017
If you have used TFS/VSTS, you might have used “Copy to Clipboard” option at least few times - either on the workitem context menu or to copy the repository URL on Clone Repository dialog . In this blog post we will see how to implement that functionality and copy text to clipboard from your VSTS/TFS extensions using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services Web Extension SDK and Typescript.
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HelloWorld Chef on Windows, Knife, Cookbook, IIS, Windows Azure & everything in between...
Tarun Arora
on Jul 3, 2017
Configuration Management is one of the key pillars of DevOps. Configuration Management helps address snowflake servers and configuration drift. Microsoft has it’s own offering for configuration management in azure with hosted DSC server through Azure Automation. Microsoft has an equally compelling story with the open source tools such as Chef and Puppet. While Chef is truly amazing in it’s capabilities, getting it going on a Windows machine can be challenging due to the various moving parts in it’s configuration… In this blogpost I’ll show you what it takes to get started with Chef by setting up Chef server on Windows, creating your first cookbook, uploading it to Chef using Knife and then using this runbook to manage a Windows host in Azure using the Chef Azure extension… Quite a mouthfull… Grab a coffee, let’s go through this together…
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So... how did it feel recording training for Microsoft?
Tarun Arora
on Jun 14, 2017
Off late I have been working with Microsoft to pull together training on DevOps. The experience of working with the Microsoft products, the staff and the broader ecosystem reflects that the Microsoft of today isn’t the Microsoft we’ve known for years…
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DevOps: Infrastructure As Code (IaC) with Azure
Tarun Arora
on Jun 13, 2017
Delighted to announce that my free training course on DevOps: Infrastructure As Code with Azure has just released on the Microsoft Open edX platform. The training has hours of video content, theory, labs and certification. It is primarily targeted at operations and development teams but is useful for anyone wanting to learn DevOps and it’s application in Modern Engineering environment with VSTS & Azure Automation. The course has been jointly developed by Avanade & Microsoft… You can check out the course here - DevOpsIacCourse
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DevOps: GitHook to verify repository email address
Tarun Arora
on Jun 13, 2017
When you are using Git for work and personal repositories although you can logically separate them in separate folders, you can accidentally commit in your personal repository with your work account and visa versa. It is annoying and in some cases might break employer policies as well. Luckily with GitHooks it’s possible to set up a pre-commit hook that allows you to use the correct email address for the correct repository, check the blogpost for how…
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Get all Azure DTL nested resources programmatically with AzureRm PowerShell
Tarun Arora
on Jun 4, 2017
Since all VMs with in an Azure Dev Test Lab (Azure DTL) are within their own resource group and have some sort of a random numeric postfix attached at the end of the resource group name. There isn’t yet an out of box AzureRm PowerShell commandlet available to query dev test lab resources. I’ve have knocked together a script which you can use to get all resources & their nested resources within an Azure Dev Test Lab using PowerShell…
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GitHooks with PowerShell on Windows to automate source control operations
Tarun Arora
on Jun 3, 2017
There are a whole host of things one tends to check before committing code into the source control system. It’s a proven fact that addressing technical issues in the product are less expensive the earlier they are identified. Git luckily gives you a bunch of events against your local repository that you can leverage to automate the pre commit checks in your codebase. The average windows user may find it difficult to script the actions using shell script. Luckily you can invoke PowerShell scripts on Windows for your GitHooks. In this blogpost we’ll cover an end to end example…
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DevOps: CI to CD with VSTS course now live!
Tarun Arora
on May 22, 2017
Delighted to announce that my free training course on DevOps: Continuous Integration to Continuous Deployment with Visual Studio Team Services & Azure has just released on the Microsoft Open edX platform. The training has hours of video content, theory, labs and certification. It is primarily targeted at development teams but is useful for anyone wanting to learn about DevOps and it’s application in Modern Engineering environment with VSTS & Azure. The course has been jointly developed by Avanade & Microsoft… You can check out the course here - DevOpsCiCdCourse
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Azure Automation - Testing PowerShell Runbooks with Pester using Team Services
Tarun Arora
on May 7, 2017
Azure Automation is a hosted, managed Service that allows you to automate application life cycle areas such as server provisioning and server configuration management. Chances are that if you are already using Azure Automation, you have runbooks that help automate the routine operational tasks. In this blogpost I’ll show you how to leverage the integration between Azure Automation & GitHub to version control your runbooks. In addition to this we’ll see how easy it is to create unit tests for your runbooks using Pester and then creating a CI pipeline for your runbooks using Team Services.
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