TFS 2017 copy build definition template between team projects

Over a year ago I’ve presented a solution to copy build definitions between team projects in new Team Foundation Server 2015. That was a workaround for missing functionality in TFS, so there was no standard way to save the build definition as a template and reuse it outside the scope of current team project. Well, in TFS 2017 it hasn’t change yet…

By Mirek on (tags: build definition, Powershell, tfs, vNext, VSO, categories: tools, infrastructure)

Does it make sense to NGen – compile your ASP.NET MVC application ?

In .Net world every line of code has to be compiled before it can be executed obviously. However the compilation process occurs twice. First the Common Intermediate Language (CIL) is produced out of human readable code and it occurs just after the development process. Then the CIL is compiled into the native code specifically to be interpreted  by the target machine. The letter step occurs on the fly, on client machine and is called the JIT (Just In Time) compilation.

By Mirek on (tags: NGen CIL JIT-compilation, categories: architecture, tools)

The dotnet Tool

In recently released .NET Core RC 2 there is possibility to use new dotnet tool. It exposes a set of commands , such us: creating empty projects restoring packages building your project unit testing .NET Core contains much more tooling but most of them are exposed thought dotnet tool. There is also no problem with extend set of commands. It has simple extensibility model – you …

By Dawid on (tags: core, dotnet, .net, rc2, categories: tools, code)

Avoid double login in Windows 10 with Bitlocker

I am using Microsoft Windows 10 on my PC and to encrypt my disk I enabled the Bitlocker on it. Bitlocker is awesome. It works seamlessly encrypts and decrypts data on the fly. Unfortunately my PC doesn’t have the TPM module and I was forced to use a password prompt at computer start to decrypt drives. And here comes the issue.

By Mirek on (tags: BitLocker, login, Windows 10, categories: tools, security)

TFS 2015 – Setting up build agent on separate machine

Recently we’ve installed and configured the Team Foundation Server on premise infrastructure. This was described here. In this post I would like to show you how to install and configure the build agent to work on a different machine separately from the TFS server, as it turned out to be quite tricky.

By Mirek on (tags: build, tfs, categories: tools, infrastructure)