Recently I was helping a client of SMEx Digital to migrate their VSTS projects. One of the requirements was also retain their ~450 test cases that they have built up.

VSTS gives you hope in the Queries interface by providing an option to "Move to team project..."

One of the manual processes that we have at SMEx is that when a pull request is accepted, the reviewer needs to go to the linked work item and update the state to "Testing" then create a child task and assign it to the QA staff to test the PBI before it can finally be marked as "Done"

It's a tedious process with many clicks involved, and I think most of the devs here follow the process, sometimes it is still missed. So I began exploring ways to automate the creation of this child testing task.

Thankfully Microsoft has a workflow engine called Flow that plays nicely with VSTS. So here's what you need to do:

At SMEx we are all for using cloud based SaaS products. We use Office 365 and Azure AD to manage our users, and we use Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365 to manage our email signatures.

The way Exclaimer works is that it reads profile info from Azure AD and generates a signature during message transport and applies it to the message. It's actually quite a neat solution.

At SMEx, we have three offices and we include the address of the office in the signature. So instead of creating three different signatures in Exclaimer, we wanted one signature that can pull the address from the user's profile attributes.

Visual Studio Code is my preferred IDE for .NET Core development because:

• It's fast
• It's highly customizable
• And did I mention fast?

So as a .NET Core developer, here's my list of must have extensions....

At SMEx Digital we have a distributed Scrum development team with resources in Australia and South Africa. Typically at the start of the day in Australia, the QA resource logs into Octopus deploy and pushes that latest version from Dev to QA to perform integration tests, as there would be new commits coming overnight from the team in South Africa.

So to save the tester roughly 10 minutes each morning waiting for environments to be deployed to QA, I decided to automate this process using Octopus Deploy and Azure Functions

Recently we've been getting the following error for our TFS build agents which caused all our builds to fail

The error reported is "The job has been abandoned because agent <agent name> did not renew the lock. Ensure agent is running, not sleeping, and has not lost communication with the service."

Investigating the _diag folder of the build agent itself reveals the actual error.

For the last month or so I've been living with my Visual Studio 2015 hanging for up to two minutes when simply right clicking on the web project and selecting Publish.

Well today I got fed up with waiting and went to search for solutions. I stumbled across this Stack Overflow answer  from Mike.

One of my pet peeves is having differently versioned NuGet packages across my projects. Previously I would just dig around in the packages.config of each project and check if the versions are consistent and install the right versioned package. Never again!

Thanks Adam for lending me his Tesla Model S for the last two weeks. It has been really fun to drive and both Hayden and Michelle love it. Hayden’s going to miss it!