Skip to main content

The Visual Studio ALM rangers ship new ALM guidance

I noticed yesterday that the Visual Studio ALM rangers shipped some new guidance on ALM:

First of all they released the Rangers Lab Management Guide on Codeplex..

Project Description

This Visual Studio ALM Ranger project has the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on guidance for the planning, setup, configuration and usage of Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by custom VM Template automation for reference environments.

The following Epics summarize the scope of the guidance which is designed for professional deployment of Lab Management in production environments.

  • Visualisation of the guidance using quick reference posters
  • Advanced golden image management using the VM Factory for Lab Management
  • Provide guidance on setting up Test environments with respect to pre-defined personas
  • Provide Guidance to enable large and small teams to setup and configure both automated and manual tests
  • Provide practical guidance for managing and maintaining a Lab Management environment
  • Provide practical guidance to enable teams to quickly setup and configure their lab management environment

They also released  Rangers Build Customization Guide on Codeplex.

Project Description

This Visual Studio ALM Ranger project has the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, code signing, and branching.

What is in the downloads?

  • Guidance contains scenario based practical guidance, frequently asked questions and quick reference posters
    - Selected PDF contains guidance and quick reference posters in PDF format only.
    - Complete contains guidance, quick reference posters and localization files in all available formats.
  • Hands-on Labs (HOL) includes:
    - HOL documents that provide walkthroughs of the technology, based on the guidance
    - HOL Package contains a HOL environment setup package allowing you to setup the HOL environment in your own environment
    - BRDLite Build Process Reference Template walk-through.
  • Samples contains sample build process templates used by the team as part of the guidance.
  • Videos which showcase the guidance in quick 5-10min videos.

The Epics included in the guidance are:

  • Practical guidance and tooling to simplify the customization of Team Foundation Build
  • Practical guidance to use Team Foundation Build process templates to automate build and non-build scenarios in Microsoft environments
  • Practical guidance to enable simple and flexible deployment of applications and their data stores
  • Practical guidance for Activities to empower developers and build engineers
  • Quality hands-on labs that complement the guidance and effectively guide the user through the features
  • Visualization of the guidance using quick reference posters
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more