VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Lab Management

Before you can start creating virtual test environments in Visual Studio Lab management you need virtual machines (VMs) or templates to create these virtual environments. To enable testing, build-deploy-test workflow and network isolation capabilities on these environments, you need to install Visual Studio Test Agent, Visual Studio Lab Agent and Team Foundation Build Agent on VMs and templates that are part of the lab environments.
Microsoft released a tool that automates this process of upgrading/installing Test, Build, and Lab Agents on a Virtual machine and configuring them. It also provides support for automating the process of creating templates with agents installed on them.

Before you can start using it, you’ll have to execute some steps:

Download RTM version of VS Agents Installer ISO and TFS installer ISO from Microsoft download center:

VS Agents Installer: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a3216d2a-0530-4f6c-a7c9-0df37c54a902&displaylang=en
TFS Installer (needed for build agent): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/1/15139F21-8A10-44E8-99D5-B37316D3F00F/X16-42785VS2010TFS1.iso
Download patches for all lab management software: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8406ef19-35a3-4c03-a145-08ba982f3cef&displaylang=en

Extract the ISOs and store the extracted files on a well-known file share that is accessible from VMs that are part of your Lab Environment. (You can use third party tools like WIN-RAR (www.rarlab.com) to extract the ISO. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ISO_image_software for other options)
Assuming your file-share is \\Share, you can create the layout as follows

Download the VMPrepTool.msi and LabMgmt.ISO as mentioned before http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt
Run VMPrepTool.msi which will install VMPrepTool_RTM.zip to the specified destination folder.

Right click on the zip file -> Properties. On bottom of the General Tab click “Unblock”. Click Apply and Ok (This will enable executing the contained PowerShell script on your machine)

Unzip the VMpreptool_RTM.zip and place the contents on the same share. Copy Labmgmt.ISO on to your share as well.

Afterwards you can log in on the Virtual Machine you want to configure, browse to the file share and start the VMPreptoolUI.exe.

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...

The art of simplicity

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