Switching environments, data sources, and other dynamically changeable settings in TFS Lab (on-premise) for 2013

Thanks to a post on this blog, we can access the settings inject into Lab-managed builds in TFS 2012 and 2013. Even though this is 2016 and many people are moving to the cloud with VSTS, there are still a good number of companies out there with considerable infrastructure "on-premise", and TFS can help with executing automated tests in those environments. I'm going to be building a library for helping others out with retrieving settings dynamically from TFS and I'll update my blog when it's available.

Getting started with creating custom Build and Release tasks for VSO

You'll need to follow the steps below in order to get started:
1) Install npm for Windows if you haven't already
2) Once npm is successfully installed and available in your PATH, execute the following command to install the TFX command line package: "install -g tfx-cli"
3) Once you've installed TFX, find a folder in which you want to work to create your package, and execute a command similar to the following: "tfx build tasks create"
4) After you finish answering the questions asked by the program, you'll have a template folder for your custom build task that you can bundle up with tfx and publish to VSO.

Continuous Delivery of Azure Web Services

See this:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-dotnet-continuous-delivery/

Bitten by IIS, or lack thereof

Here at the office, we build a number of web applications. I recently started refactoring one such application to change and improve how we deploy it. As soon as I made the change to the .csproj to remove some old configurations and add new ones, I mysteriously started getting this error on our build machine (and only our build machine):

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (2664): Filename: redirection.configError: Cannot read configuration file

After examining the changes I made, I figured "there's nothing that should be causing this. WTF?" Then after a while, I went on to our build machine and found that we didn't actually have IIS installed on the build machines (which is a good idea from a security standpoint, because there's really no reason for a build machine to have IIS installed). So why did this start suddenly ?

I went and examined the exact line that was causing the problem in the targets file, and the only thing that appeared to be including this conditional statement was the flag 'IncludeIisSettings'. Sure enough, the old configuration which we never used before and were using now had this set.

Getting code signing to work with ClickOnce on a TFS Build Agent

Code signing is a giant pain in the butt. You have to :

• Obtain the certificate for signing the code by:
1. buying the certificate from an issuer.
2. generating your own self-signed certificate
• Configure ClickOnce within your project file with the following property elements:
• <signmanifests>true</signmanifes>
• <manifestcertificatethumbprint>A387B95104A9AC19230A123773C7347401CBDC69</manifestcertificatethprint>
• Log into your machine **as the user running the build controller / agents ** and import the key to their user Personal certificate store!
• Run 'certmgr.msc' from the Run command in the start menu (WinKey + R is the hotkey)
• In the Certificate Manager that comes up, go to Personal in the tree, right-click, and select All Tasks -> Import ...
• In the Certificate Import Wizard window that comes up, select Next to move to the 'File To Import' screen.
• Select your certificate file, which has the same thumbprint as specified in your project file, then click Next to move to the 'Certificate Store' screen.
• In the 'Certificate Store' screen, select the 'Place all certificates in the following store' option, then click Browse to select the store. Choose 'Personal' in the selection window. Click Next to move to the "Completing the Certificate Import Wizard" window.
• On the "Completing the Certificate Import Wizard" window that comes up, click Finish to import the certificate.

You should now be able to build and sign your code on a TFS Build controller / agent.