This year I have the privilege to speak at SPS Houston (first time!!). I’ll give a speech about “Setting up your release pipeline for SharePoint and Office 365 developments”.

We’ll see how you can automate all the things to make your development team more productive and more efficient. For that we’ll see how to set up build and release definitions and how you can leverage both azure and on premises environments

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Montréal

I also had the occasion to help organize the event this year, it’s been an interesting experience so far and I’d like to thank Serge, Nico, Luc, Seb and Fabrice for their implication in that project, it’s much more work than what we think!

This time I’ll talk about setting up your release pipeline for SharePoint/Office 365 developments in Visual Studio Online (Team Foundation Services). (In French)

Introduction

Entity Framework is a well-known technology in the ORM domain for the .NET world.

Note: Object Relational Mapping, this is the part between data persistence unit and some more “high level” code.

When you start a new entity framework project you have a few different ways to do it, one of which being “code first”. It means our code will drive the SQL Schema evolution (which simplifies a lot of things and allows you to focus on business and not technical implementation).

Introduction

DNX will soon be released and there’ll be a growing number of developers wanting to write unit tests to improve the quality of developments.

Ideally you’d like to run these unit tests in a continuous integration process in order to make sure you didn’t introduce any regression/bug or degraded performances.

In .NET world you have many tools to write unit tests:

• MSTest/VSTest

• NUnit

• xUnit

• …

(a non-exhaustive list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks#C.23 )

In our case we chose to use xUnit because it is widely used and supported by the community, and it’s one of the few to support DNX at the moment.

If you’re doing asp.net core development and if you’re trying to publish your website to an azure website you might run into the following error when implementing this documentation.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/deploy-aspnet5?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

[error]Error: The specified credentials cannot be used with the authentication scheme ‘Basic’.

[error]Error: Default credentials cannot be supplied for the Basic authentication scheme.

[error]Parameter name: authType

This comes from the fact the provided script doesn’t support azure websies with multiple deployment slots.

With DNX/DNU soon to be RTM there’ll be more and more developers eagers to build and deploy ASP.NET core 1 (formerly ASP.NET MVC 5) projects.

If the procedure is well described when you are using hosted agents (the ones microsoft runs for you on Azure), it’s a little more complex when you want to do it on a local agent.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/deploy-aspnet5?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

On your agent’s machine you installed and updated visual studio and all the tools right?

This year I have the privilege to speak at SPS Vancouver (first time!!). I’ll give a speech about the importance of metadata in your company (therefore in SharePoint/Office 365)

If you’re in the area Saturday March the 12th 2016 don’t hesitate to register to the event. Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

I recently had to migrate multiple source repositories from TFS to GIT (Git on vsonline). To do so I used Git Tfs https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs which does the job and is well documented https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs/blob/master/doc/usecases/migrate_tfs_to_git.md

There’s one step where they instruct you to remove *.vspscc and *.vssscc files and to clean up *.sln and *.*proj files from TFS references.

This will prevent Visual Studio from trying to reconnect to TFS every time you open the project/solution.

A few months ago Microsoft released a new automated build system with visual studio online /tfs 2015.

This new mechanism is way more open than previous XAML builds, tasks based and easier to customize.

One of the available tasks allows you to run a powershell script.

Let’s  say that for one reason you want to increment automatically the version number of your SharePoint features when building.

If you have a quick look at the “.feature” file you’ll notice that the version attribute looks like a serialized object (instead of simply being the version number), this is way more complicated than simply parsing a XML file.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Ottawa. I’ll give a speech about the ALM capabilities for SharePoint/Office365 in Azure “Setting up your release pipeline for SharePoint in Azure”.

If you’re in the area Saturday November the 21st 2015 don’t hesitate to register to the event. Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.