We implemented Kanban and continuous flow almost two years ago. Continuous Delivery was a big part of that transition and we made big strides in our CD process which allowed us to deploy multiple times per week for most of our products. With the adoption of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) our teams were asked to …
Someone recently asked whether teams who wish to start the Continuos Delivery journey should focus on deployment automation or test automation first. This is a tough question and I’ve struggled with it over the last few weeks but I have finally decided on what I believe is the best approach. BOTH! To better understand my …
Continuous Delivery: Should I start with test or Deployment Automation? Read More »
By default WebDeploy/MSDeploy only deploys “changed” files. There are two ways that WebDeploy checks for changed files: by timestamp and checksum. In this blog post we will compare these options. Timestamp By default WebDeploy uses the timestamp method to identify changed files. If you try to deploy the same package twice you will see it …
WebDeploy/MSDeploy Quick Tip: Only Deploy Changed Files Read More »
I had the amazing opportunity to spend this week seeing how agile can scale to an enterprise level of 400+ team members. In this post I would like to review some of my thoughts and opinions. SAFe – Scaled Agile Framework We have been using Kanban for the last 18 months in our group at …
Several developers have asked how they can extend WebDeploy to do more. As discussed in my Anatomy of WebDeploy Package post, WebDeploy creates a package based on a manifest. The manifest is simply a list of MSDeploy providers. So how do we add more to the manifest? Sayed Hashimi posted an article entitled “Setting Folder …
Background Chef on Windows in the past has not had a great story but over the last 6 months they have come a long way to improve their support for the platform. In February of 2016 Microsoft also released the Windows Management Framework 5.0 with significant Desired State Configuration (DSC) improvements. Chef and DSC are …
DSC in Chef: Converting Ruby Hashes to PowerShell Types Read More »
There is a lot of buzz amonst the development community at large about Continuous Delivery. Everyone seems to think its a good idea but I’ve seen few execute implementation well. In this post, we will briefly review what CD is and then I’ll give my opinions on the best way to implement it (HINT: its …
Over the last few months I’ve seen several questions regarding setting WebDeploy parameterization values when deploying via MSBuild using the MSDeployPublish and related targets. These targets are used when publishing via Visual Studio or can be triggered by setting the MSBuild properties DeployOnBuild equal to “true” and DeployOnTarget to “MSDeployPublish”. The typical scenario is the …
As of this morning I have made my first VSTS task public in the VisualStudio VSTS Marketplace. I blogged about my experience developing the task last month. Check that post out for more details: VSTS Release: Custom Deploy Task to Deploy Virtual Applications to Azure This is just the beginning! I plan to add more …
MSDeployAllTheThings VSTS/TFS Extension is Public! Read More »
Microsoft and the Visual Studio team have made it very easy to deploy an ASP.NET web application. So easy that few take the time to look beyond its capabilities until absolutely necessary. MSBuild initiates WebDeploy through right click Publish functionality in Visual Studio, deployment via TFS or when you manually execute the “Package” target to …