Azure DevOps Blog
DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
Latest posts
Application Insights and Azure WebSites
Azure WebSites is a popular “fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables you to build, deploy and scale enterprise-grade web Apps in seconds” (see more about Azure WebSites here). Application Insights is a preview service available in the Azure Preview portal designed to help development teams get 360° views of their applications across Availability, Performance and Usage with fast & powerful troubleshooting, diagnostics and usage insights. While Application Insights could be used to understand if your web App was available and successful when deployed as an Azure WebSite the ability to get deep...
Understanding symbol files and Visual Studio’s symbol settings
Symbols are a fundamental requirement for debugging and other diagnostic tools. Fortunately in most cases when you are building and launching your application in Visual Studio you don’t have to think about symbols for your code. However the odds are that at some point in time you’ll need to change how symbols load, where the debugger looks for them, or will need to load symbols for a 3rd party component (e.g. Windows or .NET libraries). Additionally because symbols are so fundamental to debugging, we continue to make tweaks to the experience so understanding the ins and outs of how Visual Studio behaves can save ...
IntelliTrace Standalone Collector and Application Pools running under Active Directory accounts
You will often configure an ASP.NET web site to run as an Active Directory (AD) user so that the site can access that user’s network resources (e.g. a file share). This is accomplished by changing the identity of the IIS Application Pool the web site runs under.If you try to use the IntelliTrace Standalone Collector with such an application pool while you are logged in with a local user account (i.e. a non-AD user account) you will get this error message:User <domainusername> does not have permissions to read collection plan file "C:WindowsTempDefaultAppPool_collection_plan.ASP.NET.default.xml"This er...
Custom TraceSource and debugging using IntelliTrace
IntelliTrace in Visual Studio Enterprise comes with support for tracing out of the box. All you have to do is make sure the appropriate IntelliTrace events are enabled in VS settings and IntelliTrace will capture trace statements as events. When you are not using the default Debug.Trace methods and are instead using a custom TraceSource, you don’t want to rewrite your tracing code just to get the trace data captured by IntelliTrace. This blog post will explain how to add support for events from a custom TraceSource in addition to the events listed in VS settings (see screenshot above). If you'd like, you can ...
Application Insights – Metric Explorer (ME) – Part 2
Segmentation is one of my favorite features in Metrics Explorer in Application Insights. It helps you slice and dice the telemetry about what users are doing with your application, as well as helps you understand performance metrics. Segmentation Let me show you how easy it is to answer some basic questions by using segmentation. This is for a blog that was instrumented with Application Insights JS. Which browsers are my users using? What devices are my users using? In this case mostly my audience seems to be PC users and that’s expected as they refer to this blog while working. If it was a socia...
Application Insights: Exception Telemetry
Application Insights lets you monitor your live application for its availability, performance and usage. Exception telemetry is of course, a central piece of this. In this blog, we’ll look at the compelling diagnostics experience enabled by capturing exceptions along with request telemetry. I’ll also illustrate how you can configure your application so as to make sure you capture all the exceptions for failed requests, in any .NET application (Framework 4.0+). There are some situations where Application Insights can’t automatically capture all the exceptions you might like to see because they are cleared before t...
New whitepapers for migration and security … with more to come
We are pleased to announce two new whitepapers have landed, sharing real-world experience and research feedback. Extracting effective permissions from TFS whitepaper and sample Practical guidance and sample code based on extensive research to address two of the commonly heard requests on Team Foundation Server security: (1) Report on the effective permissions of a TFS user/group. (2) Report on security auditing for TFS. Understanding TFS migrations from on-premise to Visual Studio Online – Part 1: Concepts Guidance for understanding, planning, and implementing migrations from TFS to...
Export telemetry from Application Insights
At last! Everyone's been asking for this, so we're very pleased to announce it. You can set up a continuous export of your telemetry from the Application Insights portal in JSON format. We put the data into blob storage in your Microsoft Azure account. From there, you can pick it up and write whatever code you need to process it. For most recent updates about Continuous export go to our documentation page. Set up continuous export Open Continuous export from your Application Insights overview blade: Add a new continuous export. Choose an Azure Storage account and the destination container where you w...
Smart Unit Tests – a mental model
[Editor’s note: "Smart Unit Tests" has been renamed to “IntelliTest” with effect from Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate (RC).] Our previous post introduced Smart Unit Tests. Please read that first if you have not already done so. Now let us continue. How is “Smart Unit Tests” able to generate a compact test suite with high coverage? How does it work? Having a mental model of how it works will help us interact with the feature and interpret the results it reports. So without further ado, let’s dive in. “Smart Unit Tests” works by using run time instrumentation and monitoring: Steps (2) to (5) are re...