Developer Support
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Microsoft Best Places to Work – Chicago
This post is provided by David S. Lipien, Director Premier Support for Developers with a spotlight on Microsoft Chicago.Microsoft was awarded Crain’s Chicago Business Best Places to Work 2017 in April. This was a great external recognition for the Microsoft team in Chicago. As a leader of people at Microsoft and part of the team locally, it is something that I am proud of. Our mission at Microsoft is to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more” and that starts with each person at the company, whether they are in Redmond, Hyderabad, Chicago or across the globe.Continue reading Dav...
HoloLens – How to Create Mixed Reality Part 2
Rick McGuire, Senior ADM, provides the second post in this series -- an introduction to mixed reality development with a test drive using HoloLens, Unity, and Visual Studio 2015.With the invention of HoloLens, it is now possible to superimpose a virtual 3D world onto our exiting reality. HoloLens lets you create holograms, virtual objects that appear in the in the same space as our real world, and they seem like real objects!This is part two of my blog post on HoloLens, we left off creating a simple HoloLens application called Origami and ran it on the HoloLens emulator. If you missed my first post on this topic ...
How to estimate the size of your TFS database backup files
This post is from Senior App Dev Manager, Chev Bryan who shares how to estimate the size of your TFS database backup files.The most likely way to do this in my experience is to take a look at the most recent backup job. This can be done quite easily from a T-SQL script. Feel free to refine the bellow to suite your needs, but it should get you the basic information you require.Read the original post on Chev’s blog.Premier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essential services to help teams optimize development lifecycles and improve software qual...
mySQL, POSTgreSQL DBs as a Service
This post is from App Dev Manager, Omer Amin who spotlights mySQL and POSTgreSQL, both announced at BUILD this year.If you missed the announcement at BUILD earlier this year, Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL provide fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL database as-a-service for easy development and deployment using tools and languages customers prefer, on the cloud they trust. Capable of deploying in minutes and scaling on-the-fly, the services offer automatic backups, 35-day point-in-time restores, automatic patching, and 30 days of historical monitoring data. Both offer pricing models (A...
Migrating TFS to a new data center
This post is provided by App Dev Manager, Steve Keeler who outlines an approach for performing TFS migrations to a new data center in a different domain and where there is limited or no connectivity between the current and target environments. Applies to: TFS 2013 | TFS 2015 | TFS 2017 - This article outlines an approach for performing TFS migrations to a new data center (in a different domain) where there is limited or no connectivity between the current and target environments. In this context, migrating the TFS deployment includes restoring backups of the TFS (config & collections), SharePoint (cont...
Updating Windows Form UI elements from another thread
This post is from App Dev Manager, Omer Amin who covers how to update Windows Form UI elements using worker threads.In a typical Windows Forms .NET application, the UI elements are created and updated by the main thread. This thread is also responsible for processing Windows messages. For this reason, it is recommended to keep message processing short and simple. Long running operations performed on this thread will cause incoming Windows messages to queue up. If messages don't get processed in a timely manner, the application will appear hung to the user and provide a poor user experience.Continue on Omer’s pers...
How to Set Up Multi-Level Hierarchies in VSTS
In another awesome post about Visual Studio Team Services, Premier Developer consultant Assaf Stone talks about customizing VSTS by creating a multi-level hierarchy.BackgroundBoth VSTS (Team Services) and TFS (Team Foundation Server) have a set organizational hierarchy. An individual developer belongs to a team. A project (also called Team Project, or TP) has multiple teams, and a VSTS account – as well as a TFS collection – contain multiple projects.While it is possible to run queries that return data from multiple projects, and in TFS, reports can bring data from multiple data sources (i.e. multiple collections...
Cross-Account Package Management for NuGet in VSTS
Here is yet another awesome post from Premier Developer consultant Assaf Stone!In the following post, we will look at the difficulties in consuming packages from a different VSTS account, as part of a build process in our own account.BackgroundVisual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers package management services. As per the documentation, this is “an extension that makes it easy to discover, install and publish packages”. Team Services enables teams to collaborate with other teams through versioned, cohesive libraries and APIs, in the same way that many 3rd party vendors offer their libraries and frameworks today...
Scaling Scrum with Nexus in VSTS
This post is from Premier Developer consultant Assaf Stone.In this post, I will cover what Scrum Nexus is, where, when, and why you would want to use it, and how to set up VSTS best to accommodate your Scrum practices. As VSTS’s tooling is not yet perfect for some of Nexus’s practices, I will discuss some viable fallbacks and workarounds.Background – Why Scale?Scrum.org’s official Scrum guide defines Scrum as “A process framework used to manage complex product development”. Scrum’s events, artifacts and rules revolve around a Scrum team, which consists of a Scrum Master, Product owner, and 3-9 development team me...