Azure DevOps Blog
DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
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Directory of common test tools and utilities
One of the common challenges with getting started with a new technology is discovery of the tools and resources that can help you get started and increase your productivity…With that in mind the team has collected their list of favorite test tools:

Testing SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
Another in my MVP series of blog posts: This post is by one of the most active of the Canadian MVPs, Wes McDonald. I find it interesting that Wes and our neighbors up north have taken the spirit of the US code camps and turned it in to arguably Canada’s best developer conference that is both internationally recognized and commercially viable (no small feat in this economy) series called “DevTeach” – Great work guys!-Chuck ***********************************'**********************************************************************************Web Testing SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio...

Final CTP for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
 11/26/2012 Update. Note The final release of Visual Studio Update 1 now available, please see: Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 1 now available    Summary This week we are releasing the final CTP for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. This release is a Consumer Technology Preview of the forthcoming Visual Studio Update releasing in November. As I stated in my earlier post the intention of the Visual Studio 2012 updates is to provide continuous value to customers, adding new capabilities year-round to features in the main product release. These releases will be aligned with the core s...

Introducing Code Map in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 CTP
Another one of the ALM MVPs, Kris Lankford, has written a quick getting started with Code Map in Visual Studio 2012 Thanks Kris and sorry this has taken so long to publish!!! Introducing Code Map for Visual Studio 2012 CTP By Kris Lankford As part of the Visual Studio 2012 CTP for September, Visual Studio got a little sexier at helping you discover and visualize your code. The introduction of the Code Map feature helps compliment the variety of other tools that are included with Visual Studio to help you analyze and visualize your projects and solutions. Code Map leverages the dgml format with...

Quick Response Sample – Command line utility to create TFS Branch Scenarios
Quick Response samples provide information directly from Visual Studio ALM Rangers working with the Microsoft Visual Studio Product Group and Microsoft Services, in response to feature gaps to supplement the product and knowledge base information. Update 2012/11/22 - Please refer to the Quick Response Sample – Visual Studio Extension to support the ALM Rangers Branching and Merging guidance for the** latest** information and Visual Studio extension support for this quick response sample solution. Issue It is not simple to implement a consistent branching model as part of team project or team creation process...

Heterogeneous dependencies: what’s a development team to do? Migrate or integrate!
With the launch of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, I have seen a lot of dev teams wanting to move to this latest release, yet for most software development organizations, they are likely already using some other system to help them manage the development process. What’s a development team to do? Migrate or integrate! Migration works best for organizations where all functional groups of the development team can move off of their existing systems and adopt something new like latest version of Team Foundation Server with relatively little cost. This is ideal where companies want to further integrate sta...

Error TF254027: TFS Install and Language Restrictions in SQL Server (Express)
The new Team Foundation Server Express product is designed to work with the Express version of SQL Server. It conveniently installs SQL Server Express automatically during configuration on machines where it is not detected. However, SQL Server and SQL Server Express impose additional restrictions on a system's language settings that TFS by itself does not normally require in order to support Multilingual User Interface (MUI) systems. This means that TFS must impose additional blocks for language mismatches when it is installing SQL Server Express.The basic language restrictions for SQL Serv...

Building iOS Apps in TFS
Note: The iOS sample code used for this blog is located @ https://tfsiosbuild.codeplex.com Especially interesting is a script @ scripts/cibuild.sh  It is becoming more and more common for software shops to build applications and apps for multiple platforms and devices. In addition to other applications and platforms that you need to build, you may also need to build iOS or Mac OSX applications.  In a future post, I will cover running iOS tests and uploading them to Team Foundation Server. It’s desirable to keep all of your source code assets in the same repository regardless of the target platforms you are bui...

Populate Test Suites using hierarchical queries in Microsoft Test Manager
Running the ALM blog has been a hoot and from the readership growth it looks like people are finding it of value(thank you!) This post is on a new features in Visual Studio Update 1 and represents an experiment of having our MVPs contributing content. In this case the following steps were provided by one of our coffee loving MVPs, Anna Russo. Anna typically presents at the major test conferences like StarEast…In case you are worried about her technical prowess at the last testing conference we made a small wager that lowest evaluation score would buy dinner… I won’t tell you won and I believe we were both we...