Microsoft Development News –Visual Studio 2015 RC and VS Code multiplatform

Today @Build conference is announced the release of Visual Studio 2015 RC. This version includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development, cross-platform mobile development for iOS, Android, and Windows, including Xamarin, Apache Cordova, and Unity, portable C++ libraries, native activity C++ templates for Android, and more.

And now, you can watch our great Build 2015 session recordings as they become available, or catch-up on your favorite features with 40+ of our brand new short Connect(“on-demand”); feature videos.

To install the most recent version of Visual Studio 2015, use the following link.

Download: Visual Studio 2015 RC

To learn more about the most recent version of TFS, see the Team Foundation Server RC release notes.

Windows Holgografic is another Announcement regarding the vision of HoloLense and integration with all from IOC to Home Media .

Important: Most applications you build with Visual Studio 2015 RC are considered “go-live” and can be redistributed and used in production settings as outlined in the license agreement. However, those that are built for Windows 10 cannot be distributed or uploaded to the Windows Store. Instead, you will have to rebuild applications built for Windows 10 by using the final version of Visual Studio 2015 before submitting to the Windows Store. Also, please note that ASP.NET 5 is still in preview and is not recommended for production use at this time. You are free to use ASP.NET 4.6 in production.

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X.

In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today.

The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me earlier this week, the company now aims to meet developers where they are — instead of necessarily making them use Windows — and .NET Core is clearly part of this move.

Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to do so as an open source project. To shepherd it going forward, Microsoft also launched the .NET Foundation last year.

While it’s still somewhat of a shock for some to see Microsoft active in the open-source world, it’s worth remembering that that the company has made quite a few contributions to open source projects lately.

Even before the .NET framework announcement, the company had already open-sourced theRoslyn .NET Compiler platform. Earlier this year, Microsoft shuttered its MS OpenTechsubsidiary, which was mostly responsible for its open source projects, in order to bring these projects into the overall Microsoft fold.

TFS free Book – Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Online

We’re happy to announce the release of our newest free ebook, Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Online (ISBN 9781509300648), by Brian Blackman, Gordon Beeming, Michael Fourie, and Willy-Peter Schaub.

With this ebook, the ALM Rangers share their best practices in managing solution requirements and shipping solutions in an agile environment, an environment where transparency, simplicity, and trust prevail. The ebook is for Agile development teams and their Scrum Masters who want to explore and learn from the authors’ “dogfooding” experiences and their continuous adaptation of software requirements management. Product Owners and other stakeholders will also find value in this ebook by learning how they can support their Agile development teams and by gaining an understanding of the constraints of open-source community projects.

Download all formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub) at the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Below you’ll find the ebook’s Foreword and a few helpful sections from its Introduction:

Foreword

The ALM Rangers are a special group for several reasons. Not only are they innovative and focused on the real world, providing value-added solutions for the Visual Studio developer community, but they live and work in all four corners of the globe. The ALM Rangers are a volunteer organization. Talk about dedication! When we were offered the opportunity to write a foreword for this book, we knew we’d be part of something special.

The ALM Rangers don’t pontificate that they’ve found the one true way. This is practical advice and examples for producing great software by those who’ve done it and–most importantly–are still innovating and coding. Readers will find that they have virtual coworkers who share their experiences with honesty and humor, revealing learnings and what has worked for them. This doesn’t mean that this book lacks prescriptive guidance. The Rangers have embraced Visual Studio Online as their one and only home. They are evolving with the product, embracing open source software in GitHub to learn how successful OSS projects are run there and what the community values most. They’ve created an ecosystem that identifies the “low hanging fruit” and tracks it from idea to solution, and they never fail to recognize the Rangers and the ALM VPs who dedicate their personal time and passion to their OSS projects.

The extensive guidance shared here is not an end-to-end plan for everyone, although it could be used as a definitive guide for some teams. One of the many assets of this book is its organization into practical walkthroughs of typical ALM Ranger projects from idea to solution, presented as an easy to consume reference. Other bonuses are an appendix to quick-start your own project and reference checklists to keep you on track.

Among the authors, this book was called the “v1 dawn edition.” True to their core value of “learn from and share all experiences,” the ALM Rangers are always mindful that producing great software means continuous refinements from new learnings and feedback and that there will be more versions of this book. But first we invite you to immerse yourself in Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Online.

In the true spirit of Agile, ongoing innovation,

Sam Guckenheimer
Clemri Steyn

Introduction
This book assumes that you have at least a minimal understanding of Agile, Lean, and Scrum development concepts and are familiar with Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Online (VSO). To go beyond this book and expand your knowledge of Agile practices or Visual Studio technologies, MSDN and other Microsoft Press books offer both complete introductions and comprehensive information.

This book might not be for you if …
This book might not be for you if you are looking for an in-depth discussion focused on the process, development, or architecture of software requirements, tooling, or practices.

Similarly, if you are looking for source code or guidance on ALM, DevOps, or proven and official frameworks such as Agile, Scrum and Kanban, this book will not be fully relevant, and we recommend that you consider these publications instead:

Release Management and DevOps with TFS 2013 and future – FAQ

The Subject of Operations (DevOps) it is meanwhile an Hot aspect in the ALM of any application from the point of view of Delivery, Quality, Costs and Reliability. That is the first part of an series regarding this topic.

I will use  a dummy MVC Web Application that’s basically the Visual Studio 2013 template plus a small modification to the web.config so that we can demo the workflow but The same Flow can be , sure with depending complexity with any kind of Application (Native, Multiplatform, Managed or hybrid combinations).

The example I have is to show a message on the home page from a setting in the web.config. This setting then varies based on the environment (dev, prod, etc) the application is running on, and this will be the variable that will be changed by web.config transformations and Release Manager.

Although I’m using an AppSettings key, you can use it for other settings and connection strings as well. The same rules apply.

I made the following modifications:

Index.cshtml

HomeController.cs

Web.config

The application should show  the msg from the web.config settings as per below (running from Visual Studio);

Setting up web.config transforms

I’ll not go into too much detail on how to setup web.config transforms and what the transformation syntax is for them, as they’ve been very well explained on MSDN.

The strategy that I used here was to structure my transformations so that:

1. The original web.config file has the settings needed for the developer to run in debug mode in Visual Studio
2. I added a new configuration (Release) that will have the proper web.config transformations to put tokens in the key/values that I need to be changed later by Release Management:

The same transformed config using Release configuration will be used by Release Management (RM) to deploy to all the environments in the release path.RM will then substitute the “__EnvLabel__” token with the appropriate value for each target deployment environment.

TFS Build

You can use any template for the build, including the RM template to trigger a release directly from the build.

The trick here is to force the web config transformation to happen during build, so you end up with a web.config that has the tokens RM is expecting. By default, web config transformations only happen during deployment.

In order for you to add this behaviour, you can add the following arguments to MSBuild:

/p:UseWPP_CopyWebApplication=true /p:PipelineDependsOnBuild=false

Also, make sure that you’re building the correct configuration that has the transforms to add the token (in our example is Any CPU and Release):

Once the build finishes, the output should look like this (noticed the web.config transformed to include the token):

Release Path setup

Now, we have to take that config and replace the tokens with the proper values according to the target environment. In this example, I’m going to use an Agent-based setup. I’ll update this later to also include an Agent-less deployment using PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).

First we configure Release Manager Server, Release Management Client and a deployment agent on the target server. You can find more detailed information on setting up those parts here: Install Release Management Server and Client, Install Deployment Agents..

I used the same target server to simulate both DEV and PROD IIS environments, by using two different ports:

Then I configured a server in RM to point to that box:

Next I configured the two environments, DEV and PROD:

Next step is to configure a release path where we have a DEV -> PROD deployment flow:

The setup above is, of course, overly simplistic for demo purposes. What you should have in mind is that you can configure who can approve (individuals or groups), who can validate and whether those steps are automated or not. In my example, I don’t need approvals for DEV, but need one for PROD. When the deployment workflow is initiated, DEV will be deployed automatically while PROD will wait for an approval before proceeding.

Next step is to configure the components to be deployed, in this case our web application:

I chose to use the “builds with application” option, since I’m going to use the build definition that will be defined in the release path.

Next, I’ll setup the deployment tool. In my case, XCopy, but you can use MS Deploy or other tool as appropriate:

The secret of the web.config token replacement happens here on the Configuration Variables. We specify that the replacement happens “Before Installation”, so that the config file is updated before being copied to the target server. We also specify the wildcard to tell RM what files we want RM to look for tokens: in this case *.config.

Next we define the release template. In this example:

• You can see the DEV -> PROD workflow
• Servers in the deployment (I only have one in this example, but you might have multiple most likely)
• Components: the application being deployed (you might have to manually add it by right-clicking Components
• I included optional steps to backup current site, and to rollback in case deployment fails (more of a best practice, but they’re not necessary)

Notice that the “EnvLabel” token we specified before gets a value here, depending on the environment, along with the other variables like target and backup folders:

Deploying

Let’s get some action going!

We initiate the release manually, choosing the template we configured previously, PROD as the last stage and selecting the last build as the one to deploy:

After a while we should see the following results:

Notice that the deployment to DEV was completed, but deployment to PROD is waiting for approval.

DEV has been successfully deployed:

While PROD has not yet:

The reason is that we’re waiting for approval. Let’s go ahead and open the approval window using the RM web client:

Clicking on the “Approve” for the selected release, we get the following dialog:

If we want to approve, but delay the deployment for later (off-hours deployment), we can click on the “Deferred Deployment” and select a day/time for when the deployment will execute:

After approval is given, the workflow resumes and finishes deploying to PROD:

There you have it!

Visual Studio 2015 Product Lineup available with Versions and changes

The Marketing Team of VS has announcing the editions of Visual Studio 2015 that will be available when we release the final product this summer.

Focus is to improve upon the power and productivity of Visual Studio, making it easier to use, no matter what platform you’re on, no matter what app you’re building and make it easier for you to choose which edition of Visual Studio is the right one for you.

More value will deliver bringing Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate into one single offering called Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. It includes all the high value features you’re already familiar with in Visual Studio Ultimate, along with new innovation that’s coming with the 2015 release. So, in addition to Visual Studio Community and Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, our new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN rounds out the three primary Visual Studio 2015 offerings.

The Visual Studio Professional, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Server Express, Visual Studio Express and MSDN Platforms will be continued to offer as a part of the complete Visual Studio 2015 and MSDN portfolio.

Getting Visual Studio 2015

Customers who have an active subscription for Visual Studio Premium with MSDN or Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN will automatically get upgraded to Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. And the pricing of Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN will be significantly less than the current price of Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN. Check out the Visual Studio 2015 Product Editions for detailed feature and pricing information, including the current promotions ,so you can get the most value out of Visual Studio today.

Also if you haven’t tried it yet, download Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 to test out the new features and send feedback through the usual channels (UserVoice, Send-a-Smile, or Connect).

Here is an Feature comparison between the VS 2013 Versions

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-studio-products-vs.aspx

How To Use TFS 2013 with SharePoint 2013 Sp1 and Sql 2012 sp1 on Windows 2012 R2

In new deployment scenarios you will need the TFS 2013 or 2012 on an windows 2012 R2 server, that will never support SharePoint 2010, so we need an SharePoint 2013 SP1, that support windows 2012 R2 for now.

Before Run all Windows Updates before installing SharePoint 2013, and get the CU updates of Sql2012 sp1 and SharePoint 2013 Sp1 .

If That box already has TFS 2013 on an windows 2012 R2 server . by Installing updates are the key steps that will prevent tantrums from SharePoint . Always, install of the required updates and ideally the optional ones also.

installation of SharePoint 2013 with Sp1

SharePoint Team They have really slicked up the installation process for SharePoint,

Instead use the auto-run that comes from running the DVD directly, or you can just run the “prerequisiteinstaller” from the root first.

When the prerequisites are complete you can start the installation proper and enter your key . If you get this wrong you will be next completing an uninstall to pick the right option. You can Avoid express at all costs and in this case we already have Team Foundation Server 2013 Sp1 installed and already have SQL Server 2012 sp2 installed.

Using configuration wizard will lead you through the custom config but if  you are running on a local computer with no domain, like me, then you will have to run a command line to generate the database before you proceed.

Well, do not dispair because PowerShell –as always –  is your friend. So just start the SharePoint 2013 management PowerShell console and use the cmdlet :

New-SPConfigurationDatabase

We have now a farm we can complete the configuration. Just work though the wizard as , although you are on your own if you select kerberos for single sign-on.

SharePoint 2013 SP1 will then run though its configuration steps and give you a functional, but empty SharePoint environment. At the end you get a simple Finish button and some instructions that you need to follow for getting your site to render in a browser.

Info: SharePoint 2013 works now in Chrome and other non Microsoft browsers…

Now you get almost 25 services that you can chose to install or not. If you leave them all ticked then you will get about 10-12 new databases in SQL, Its too hard to figure out what the dependencies are and what you need .

Configuring processes and extending can be long and will add solution into SharePoint. Will be a site template added but as it will likely look the nice new SharePoint 2013 Sp1 interface we will need to create the site manually.

Now that the SharePoint bits have been setup we will have a default link setup between SharePoint and Team Foundation Server. Although if we had a separate Team Foundation Server instance we would need to tell it where the TFS server is.

Info: You have to install the Extensions for SharePoint Products on every front end server for your SharePoint farm.

SharePoint 2013 Web Applications Configuration in Team Foundation Server 2013

Now we have installed and configured the bits for SharePoint as well as telling it where the TFS server is we now need to tell TFS where to go.

There is no account listed as an administrator! I am using the Builtin\Administrator user as both the TFS Service Account and the SharePoint Farm Admin you don’t need one.

Site Configuration Collections

In order to have different sites for different collection and enable the ability to have the same Team Project name in multiple collection then you need to create a root collection site under the main site. Some folks like to create this at the ^/sites/[collection] level, but I always create the collection site as a sub site of the root. This have the benefit of creating automatic navigation between the sites…

This final test as when you click OK the Admin Console will go off and try to hook into, or create a site for us. if you do want to have a greater degree of separation between the sites and have them in different collections you can indeed do that as well. You may want to do that if you are planning to separate collection to multiple environments, but I can think of very few reasons that you would want to do that.

Using the new Team Project Site

If we create a new team project the template from the Process Template that you selected will be used to create the new site. These templates are designed to work in any version of SharePoint but they may look cool.

This team project was created before there was ever a SharePoint server so it has no portal. Lets go ahead and create one manually.

They have moved things around a little in SharePoint and we now create new sub sites from the “View Content” menu.

This, while much more hidden is really not something you do every day. You are much more likely to be adding apps to an existing site so having this more clicks away is not a big deal.

When we care the new site we have two options. We can create it using the provided “Team Foundation Project Portal” bit it results in a slightly ugly site, or you can use the default “Team Site” template to get a more native 2013 feel.

This is due to the features not yet being enables… so head on over to “cog | Site Settings | Site Actions | Manage site features” to enable them.

You can enable one of:

• Agile Dashboards with Excel Reporting – for the MSF for Agile Software Development 6.x Process Template
• CMMI Dashboards with Excel Reports – for the MSF for CMMI Software Development 6.x Process Template
• Scrum Dashboards with Reporting – for the Visual Studio Scrum 2. Recommended Process Template

The one you pick depends on the Process Template that you used to create the Team Project. I will activate the Scrum one as I used the Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Recommended Process Template which I heartily recommend. You will have noticed that here are 2 or 3 for each of the “Agile | SMMI | Scrum” monikers and this is due to the different capabilities that you might have. For example:

• Agile Dashboards – I have TFS with no Reporting Services or Analysis Services
• Agile Dashboards with Basic Reporting – I have Reporting Services and Analysis Services but not SharePoint Enterprise
• Agile Dashboards with Excel Reporting – I have Everything! Reporting Services, Analysis Services and SharePoint Enterprise

If you enable the highest level of the one you want it will figure out the one that you can run  and in this case I can do “Scrum Dashboards with Reporting”.

Scrum template does not have any built in Excel Reports, but it does have Reporting Services reports. Now when I return to the homepage I get the same/similar portal you would have seen in old versions of SharePoint 2010.

Conclusion

Team Foundation Server 2013 & 2012 works with SharePoint 2013 Sp1 on Windows server 2012 R2 and we have manually created our Team Project Portal site.