Author: Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

Michael Kaufmann is the CEO of Xpirit Germany, a Microsoft Regional Director (RD) and a Microsoft MVP. He has been working as an IT consultant for more than 20 years. Mike is a published book author, keynote speaker, and regular technical speaker at international conferences. Ask him about DevOps, Git, Agile, and GitHub.
ALM, DevOps, DSC, PowerShell2 Comments

Be careful with custom variable names in Release Management

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

If you use Visual Studio Release Management vNext / 2013 with PowerShell/DSC you probably have a lot of custom configuration variables that you pass to your scripts. Be careful when you choose the names for these variables because! There are a lot of reserved words. For example the word UserName is reserved. This leads to very odd error messages that are really hard to track down: System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred. —> Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Common.Helpers.OperationFailedException: Permission denied while trying to connect to the target machine <hostname> on the port:5985 via power shell remoting. Please check the following link for instructions: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=390236System.Management.Automation.Remoting.PSRemotingTransportException: … Continue reading Be careful with custom variable names in Release Management

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Deploy to none domain machines with Visual Studio Release Management vNext

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

There is a lot of documentation on how to deploy to machines outside your domain using agent based deployment ( i.e. on msdn) using shadow accounts. But I couldn’t find any documentation if and how this is done using vNext / agent-less deployment. If you deploy to server outside your domain you get the following error messge: Connecting to remote server <name> failed with the following error message : WinRM cannot process the request. The following error with errorcode 0x80090311 occurred while using Kerberos authentication: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.  So this is … Continue reading Deploy to none domain machines with Visual Studio Release Management vNext

ALM, Development, DevOps, O365, SharePointLeave a comment

Side notes for SharePoint and O365 developers from #MSIgnite

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

I’m not trying to cover all relevant aspects of SharePoint announcements that are made the last days on Microsoft Ignite – I’m sure you’re all following it closely. I just want to highlight the most important aspects for SharePoint developers and the impact they have on my work. Provisioning Engine The Office365 Developer Patterns and Practices group announced a provisioning engine for provisioning SharePoint artifacts (sites, lists, fields, content types etc.). It takes a xml file with a custom syntax as the input and provisions the content using the API. It also works both ways – you can use the … Continue reading Side notes for SharePoint and O365 developers from #MSIgnite

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xSharePointProvisioning Module – PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

The xSharePointProvisioning module contains DSC resources to provision SharePoint artifacts using the Client Side Object Model (CSOM). There are two versions: one for O365 and ne for SharePoint on premise. Currently the following resources are in the package: xList Ensure a list with a specific title and description at a given URL. If the list does not exist it will be created with the specified template. xField Ensure that a list at a specific url has or has not a specified field. XListItem Ensure that a list at a specific url has or has not a list item with the … Continue reading xSharePointProvisioning Module – PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

ALM, DevOps, DSC, PowerShell1 Comment

Use the DSC Script resource to change the application pool identity

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

The Desired State Configuration (DSC) module xWebAdministration does not yet support changing the identity of an application pool. There is a community fork cWebAdministration that seems to support it –  but I have not tested it yet. What I did was to use the script resource to change the identity using the module WebAdministration. This is pretty straight forward so I just share the code here. Note that after changing the identity the state of the application pool is stopped. You can use the xWebAppPool resource to start it again. Continue reading Use the DSC Script resource to change the application pool identity

ALM, DevOps, DSC, PowerShell, SharePointLeave a comment

Configuring your SharePoint farm for DSC with xSharePointAdministration

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

Getting the xSharePointAdministration module to work has a lot of gotchas. So I decided to write a separate post for it. First of all: the xSharePointAdministration module uses the PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell” for all its work. It therefore must be run on only one server in the farm – this would normally be the server that hosts the central administration. I will refer to this server as the deployment server. Make sure to do all the work on the deployment server. Desired state configurations are run by the Windows Management Instrumentation (winmgmt) service. This service normally runs under the “Local System” … Continue reading Configuring your SharePoint farm for DSC with xSharePointAdministration

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Moving from PowerShell DSC to Release Management vNext DSC

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

If you’ve learned plain PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and then move to Visual Studio Release Management vNext there are a lot of gotchas that can cost you many hours or event days to figure them out. I thought I share some things I’ve learned the hard way to get people up and running more quickly. If you use plain DSC you normally have one structural configuration for the entire environment and an environment specific configuration that you change for each environment. Environment Configuration(Dev/Test/Prod) $TargetFolder = “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Demo”$WebServerCount = 2 .psd1 Structural Configuration WindowsFeature IIS{    Name = “Web Server”    Ensure = … Continue reading Moving from PowerShell DSC to Release Management vNext DSC

DevOps, DSC, PowerShell1 Comment

Packaging DSC configurations for Visual Studio / TFS Release Management vNext

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

If you are using Visual Studio Release Management vNext to release your applications you’ll probably have DSC (Desired State Configuration) configurations that are shared between applications or provided by your operations team. In both cases they have a different lifecycle than your application and should be provisioned individually. But how do you publish PowerShell scripts or other files with the TFS build engine without creating empty solutions and adding the files? What you can do is to add a simple project file like TFSBuild.proj that calls a PowerShell script. This project file can be used in a team build. The … Continue reading Packaging DSC configurations for Visual Studio / TFS Release Management vNext

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Add ApplicationInsights to your O365 SharePoint sites

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

If you use ApplicationInsights in your SharePoint Apps you might also want to include it in all sites of the hosting web. You can do this by injecting the corresponding JavaScript using the client side object model (CSOM) and UserCustomActions. Go to https://portal.azure.com/ and open your ApplicationInsights-Application or create a new one. Go to “Quick start” – “Get code to monitor my web pages” and copy the code insight the script tags. Save the script to a JavaScript file and upload it to your O365 site (i.e. to /Style%20Library). Use the following PowerShell script to inject the JavaScript file without … Continue reading Add ApplicationInsights to your O365 SharePoint sites

Uncategorized1 Comment

Extend xSharePointAdministration Desired State Configuration (DSC) with custom resources

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

I’ve got a lot of positive feedback about the DSC module xSharePointAdministration – but there was not a lot of activity in git hub. The reason might be, that developers do not use PowerShell or DSC very often – and scripting guys and administrators do not use git hub. Also the learning curve for writing custom DSC resources is pretty hard. So I decided to give you a little jump start here. Write normal PowerShell scripts first Do not try to directly write your DSC resource. The debugging experience is not as good as it should be. Start by building … Continue reading Extend xSharePointAdministration Desired State Configuration (DSC) with custom resources