Moving from PowerShell DSC to Release Management vNext DSC
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
Packaging DSC configurations for Visual Studio / TFS Release Management vNext
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
Add ApplicationInsights to your O365 SharePoint sites
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
Extend xSharePointAdministration Desired State Configuration (DSC) with custom resources
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
xSharePointAdministration Module – PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)
Today I added the first version of the PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Module xSharePointAdministration to the Script Center. The module contains resources to configure and deploy SharePoint environments. The current version has only limited resources. I will add more resources in the near future since I have some projects that will build upon the module. The goal is to provision a complete SharePoint farm using DSC so that you can easily deploy it to different environments – either in the cloud or on premise – and avoid the configuration shift that normally takes place after some time between test, … Continue reading xSharePointAdministration Module – PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)
How to get SharePoint developers to automate deployments
In every environment you need to automate the deployment process for SharePoint solutions – weather they’re sandboxed solutions, farm solutions or apps. But developers are lazy – and it’s so easy to click “Deploy” in VS that normally the deployment scripts are poorly tested. To get the developers to use and test the deployment scripts you have to integrate them in visual studio. If you use PowerShell scripts for your deployments and always place them in the same location this is pretty easy. You can add the scripts as “External Tools” and then add them to the context menu. To … Continue reading How to get SharePoint developers to automate deployments
Gartner sieht Microsoft als einen der Top Leader bei Software Testing
Gartner hat am 28. August seinen neuen Bericht Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites veröffentlicht. Microsoft ist mit dem TFS und VS wieder bei den Top Leadern dabei. Continue reading Gartner sieht Microsoft als einen der Top Leader bei Software Testing
SPEmulators v1.1.0 available
I just released the new Version (v1.1.0) of the #SPEmulators on nuget. The release contains the following changes: Support for test projects that target .net 4.5 (previous 4.5.1) Support for VS Premium with version 2012 Update 2 or higher (thanks to Tiliavir for the support) The assembly is now signed Added support to create lists by schema.xml and elements.xml to GetOrCreateList The last feature is quite experimental. There is support for fields (text, number, date, user, lookup) from schema.xml. There is also support for the basic properties in the elements.xml. I also added support for default data that is deployed … Continue reading SPEmulators v1.1.0 available
SPEmulators available on nuget
Every SharePoint developer that does TDD is desperately waiting for Microsoft to release a Version of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Emulators for SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately it seems that Microsoft does not have any plans to publish a new release in the near future. This is completely incomprehensible since there are a lot of SP2010 solutions that must be migrated to SP2013. To close the gap there is now the the nuget package SPEmulators. The source code is available in a repository on GitHub. Installation To install SPEmulators, run the following command in the Package Manager Console: Install-Package SPEmulators. You can also search for … Continue reading SPEmulators available on nuget
SPEmulators auf NuGet verfügbar
Eine lange Zeit nun warten die SharePoint-Entwickler auf eine neue Version der Microsoft.SharePoint.Emulators für SharePoint 2013. Leider scheint Microsoft aber in absehbarer Zukunft keine neue Version herauszubringen. Das ist völlig unverständlich, da es ja auch viele 2010er Lösungen gibt, die nach 2013 migriert werden müssen. Um die Lücke zu schließen gibt es jetzt das Nuget-Package SPEmulators. Der Code ist auf GitHub verfügbar. Installation Die Installation erfolgt wie immer per Package-Manager-Console mit dem Befehl: “Install-Package SPEmulators”. Alternativ kann über “Manage NuGet Packages” nach dem Paket gesucht werden. Ein Klick auf “Install” fügt das Paket dem aktuelle Projekt hinzu. Erstellen des ersten … Continue reading SPEmulators auf NuGet verfügbar
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