Monday 28 September 2015

Personal Access Tokens in Visual Studio Online

When you try to access some services in Visual Studio Online, you might need to enter your Alternate Credentials. Think about Git, for example.

This approach works, no questions about it. But in terms of security it isn’t the best choice. It isn’t granular at all and credentials have no expiry date.

But Visual Studio Online also provides Personal Access Tokens, to fix this inconvenience. A Personal Access Token offers better granularity and expiration management:

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And how to use it? You need to safely store it (you can’t access them after the creation, by design), and then you can use the string in place of the password when asked.
The username in that case can be whatever, it is just not used.

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Tuesday 15 September 2015

Why shall I split the columns in the Kanban Board?

A very interesting discussion came out at the SmartDevsUG meeting last night about the Kanban Split Columns in TFS and VSO. What is the real rationale behind it in a real world project? Why should I have a Resolved column split in Doing and Done, for example?

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Without taking into consideration the Kanban principles behind this tool, I have an easier explanation. If you step back from the technical stuff for a moment and you think about the business side of it, it is pretty clear.

For example, you are working on a customer hotfix for your product – the code is done, the fix is tested thoroughly and you are technically done. But you aren’t completely done – did you deliver the hotfix to the customer? Or from a different perspective, is it billed? Until this hurdle isn’t cleared, you are in a Resolved-Done situation.

Thursday 10 September 2015

Reading the TFS update logs

Did you ever read a TFS update log? If not, you should do it.

Once you do anything on the TFS databases, all the operations are logged, obviously. You can reach these logs from the Administration Console:

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The amount of data in there is really helpful – for example, each Stored Procedure used by the installer is detailed, giving you an idea of what happens to your databases during each update:

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And you also get a recap of how long it took with each individual timing:

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That is interesting enough if everything works, but what about when something fails?

Well, that’s even better, because if you experience an error whatsoever, you will get a detailed exception stacktrace in the logs:

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This gives you a real actionable insight before touching anything or raising the phone to call CSS.