Export your GeeksWithBlogs.net blog posts as Markdown files

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 18, 2016

Do you host your blog posts in GeeksWithBlogs.net (GWB)? Well, you probably know then that, GWB does not provide any means to download/backup your posts. This is a big problem if you want to move to another hosting provider like GitHub/Wordpress and you cannot download any your existing posts. Fortunately, GWB posts can be fetched via MetaWebBlog API and with some simple C# code, you can backup your blog posts.

I host my blog here using Jekyll engine and wanted a quick way to convert all my posts in the markdown format. This utility provides a quick way to fetch your posts from GWB and save them as markdown.

How to troubleshoot failing Artifacts in AzureDevTestLabs

Tarun Arora on Jun 12, 2016

If you are using Azure DevTestLabs you are probably loving and leveraging the Public/Private artifact repository feature available in the labs. The feature is great but should the artifacts fail it’s not easy to get to the logs of the failure to diagnose the issue. In this blogpost I’ll show you the two available ways to see the artifact logs in Azure DevTestLabs.

Using VSTS Release Management for Continuous Deployments to AzureDevTestLabs

Tarun Arora on May 26, 2016

Provisioning infrastructure in your release pipeline gurantees a well known dependancy state of your software. In an average IT department software is developed by one team, infrastructure is provisioned by the other and software deployments are carried out by another. These silos often make releasing software such a misery. In this blogpost we’ll learn how to bring these three distinct activities into one single release pipeline to make releases as smooth as a riding a gravy train. It’s so easy, you’d want to do it for every application…

How to configure WinRM for HTTPS manually

Utkarsh Shigihalli on May 21, 2016

In this post we will see how you can configure WinRM (Windows Remote Management) service to work with HTTPS manually.

Join a VM to existing AD Domain using ARM template in Azure Dev Test Lab

Tarun Arora on May 17, 2016

Learn how to domain join your Azure DevTestLab VM to with an Active Directory Domain Controller using a powershell artifact. We’ll trigger this process from VSTS. The private artifact repository will also be available & exposed in DevTestLab for virtual machines in the lab.

How to bring DevOps practices to legacy applications (#c9d9 - ContinuousDiscussions)

Tarun Arora on May 14, 2016

Recently I participated in an online panel to discuss how best to tackle Continuous Delivery for Legacy Applications. This was one in the series of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9). #c9d9 is a series of community panels about Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Read on for some of the key points that emerged in this discussion… Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions of your own…

Configure WinRm with ARM template in AzureDevTestLab VM deployment using PowerShell artifact

Tarun Arora on May 14, 2016

WinRM configuration isn’t straightforward, it is tedious to say the least, if you get one step in the process wrong, more often than not it comes back to bite you later. In this blogpost I’ll show you a really cool way to automate WinRM configuration through Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. Further in this blog post, I’ll show you how to trigger the deployment of this ARM template to create a new VM in AzureDevTestLab using VSTS.

How to move custom images (vhd) between Azure DevTest Labs

Tarun Arora on May 10, 2016

Like me if you are using multiple Dev Test Labs in Azure for multiple teams, you would like to share custom images created by one group to the other if it helps them accelerate. After all sharing is caring :) In this blog post we’ll learn how to move custom images aka VHD’s between Azure Dev Test Labs. It would be great if you could leave a comment if you know a better way of achieving this… I would also be interested to know what other assets are you sharing between Azure Dev Test labs…

Deploying a new VM in an existing AzureDevTestLab from VSTS

Tarun Arora on May 6, 2016

In this blogpost we’ll learn how to deploy a new Virtual Machine to an exisitng Azure DevTest Lab from VSTS using an ARM template.

SonarQube Analysis in Continuous Integration using Team Build in VSTS

Tarun Arora on May 5, 2016

In this blogpost we’ll learn how to expose SonarQube endpoint to Team Build in VSTS and run a full code analysis cycle as part of the continuous integration pipeline. We’ll then look at the code analysis results summary in VSTS and see the build version mapping between VSTS and SonarQube.