ALM MVP, Richard Hundhausen, is running a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer event in London, England 8-12 February, 2016. This event is the only 2016 Scrum.Org training in the United Kingdom for Scrum professionals interested in becoming a trainer for the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program.

(Editors note: due to the popularity two new “Unleash your DevOps Practices” were added)
 

Northwest Cadence and Rennie Araucto are offering a bunch of great webinars to bring in your Holidays and New Year.
Unleash you DevOps potential with Visual Studio Enterprise!

We are updating the Visual Studio Team Services Build Steps and thought these topics would be of interest:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/steps/index.
If you want to create your own Build Task check out my post here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charles_sterling/archive/2015/11/15/devops-php-sample-for-cory-fowler-and-his-phpworld-presentation.aspx
 
 
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Cloud Load Test Build Task
Use Visual Studio Cloud-based Load Test to understand,

This week I have had two questions that involved the need to create a load test plugin.   In the latest scenario the person wanted Cloud-based load test to ramp up the user count randomly.
Yes plugins work the same for both on-premises and Cloud-based load testing. 

If you watched the Connect() event I am sure you noticed that we are focusing on enabling cross platform development with Visual Studio Team Services.
This definitely includes testing those applications.   The new Visual Studio Team Services includes build tasks to make it easy to integrate your build and testing efforts into your release pipelines with rich reporting highlighting build-on-build changes,

After publishing  Load Testing from different geographies with Cloud-based load testing I have have had a couple of people ask how do you schedule Load Tests. 
Depending on what type of load testing you are doing there are two ways to do this. 

We’re excited to announce the Public Preview of the new Visual Studio Marketplace – the one place to discover and acquire extensions, integrations and subscriptions for the Visual Studio family of products. Now publishers can directly host their extensions on the Visual Studio Marketplace and engineering teams can use these extensions to build great applications for any platform and any OS.

Today’s faster application cycle times beg test tools that are easier to use and that are always available in the environment you are working in -and the Microsoft Exploratory Testing delivers this.  The new Exploratory Testing extension makes it easy for you document your exploratory test,

 
The new DevTest Labs solves a ton of challenges for DevOps teams wanting to build, deploy and test builds on a regular basis. DevTest Labs makes it easier to create test environments with reusable templates with everything your team needs to start developing and testing applications.

Last week I was asked a pretty common question:
“How do you generate and distribute load in a Performance Test across different geographic locations”
This person knows our load Testing features well and knew about the new location picker (see below).