Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

From some time, one of our projects has the Integration Tests on RED . It seems that randomly, some tests are failing. This usually happens only on the CI machine (Visual Studio Team Services). The strangest thing is the behavior. The behavior cannot be reproduced on the development machine. The reported errors are caused by asserts or strange exceptions - for example that an external resources doesn't exist. From time to time, the error can be reproduced on the local machine, but only once. The fail cannot be reproduced twice on the same machine. After a few sprints and a lot of time invested in this issue, we still had the same problem. After a review of <the problem,the code, how the tests were written>, the root causes were identified and isolated. Let's see what were the steps and causes of this problem. Step: Isolate the integration tests in a dedicated build. Why: You want to reduce the build time us much as possible and run only the tests that you want w...

Visual Studio Team Service (known as VSO - Visual Studio Online) is a powerful tool that allows us to share code, track work, create build, deploy them and so on. Everything that you can do using TFS 2015, you can do now from Visual Studio Team Services - AS A SERVICE. We don't need anymore to install and manage TFS Server of build agents - life is easier. When you need to do a migration from on-premises to an external provider (in our case cloud), you need to see how you can: Migrate automatically, with minimal or no human intervention Migrate all change sets Migrate the task list This can be done easily, using " OpsHub Visual Studio Online Migration Utility ". This is a simple tool that allows us to migrate all our data from on-premises to cloud without any kind of problems. If you have custom templates, than you might need to do some custom configuration, but otherwise is working pretty smooth.  Another tool that should be used for situations like this i...

In this post we will see what we need to do when we want to add a new user on our Visual Studio Online project, but we end up with errors like 401 403 TF400813 Let's start from the assumption that we are the administrator on VS Online. We added a user a few days ago on our project, with the same rights like other users. Even if we added the user, he is not able to access our project. It is well known that sometimes we need to wait a few hours until the rights and changes are propagated, but it never takes more than 12-24h. In this moment we need to ask yourself what is different. There are times when the change propagation freeze and you need to remove and add the user again. We sad that this might be possible and let's remove the user and add him again to VS Online and to our project. After removing the user we observed that we cannot find anymore the given account, even if it was a LIVE account. This was strange and odd. We remembered that a few days ago we had a...

Playing with Visual Studio Online is sometime like playing with fire. It works great 99.99% of time, but from time to time you have a problem and you cannot find easily support. In this post we will talk about what you need to do when you want to add a new user and you end up with 401 or 403 error code. This days we wanted to add a new user to our Visual Studio Online project. In the portal, when we wanted to add the new user we ended up with the following error: "AAD guest users are not allowed to search in AAD" This happens when we want to add a new user to a group. Even if we were administrators, we were not able to do any change. This was something new for us, 2 weeks ago everything was fine. What happen in the last period of time. Our company integrated our own AD with Azure AD. To be able to use your administrator's rights on Visual Studio Online you need to be added to Azure AD (even if you have a LIVE account) as Member. By default you will be Guest. Pow...