Retain VSTS Build Indefinitely – Fetch Build ID from RM artifact variable

While showing a Visual Studio Release Management demo in a Practical DevOps training, I stressed how important it was that the build artifact, which was used during a release, was not destroyed by the built-in retention policy. By default, the output of a build run is only stored for 10 days. So, in case you really want to keep the build and build artifacts, you must take care of this yourself.

For that purpose I created a powershell script which calls the VSTS REST API to accomplish this.

The powershell script is called from a release management task at the beginning of the release process.

The powershell script calls the VSTS Build v2 REST API and uses Basic Authentication (passed in the headers) with a Personal Access Token password.

At the moment I worked on this activity (probably still in private preview of VSRM – September 2015) it was not possible yet to fetch the exact Build ID through the build artifact which is linked in the release definition. That’s why I was dropping a simple text file with the Build ID in the build process which was also stored in the build artifact. That file was then used in the release management process to parse the Build ID.

Apparently, this workaround is not necessary anymore and you can now immediately fetch the Build Id from the build artifact via a pre-defined release management artifact variable RELEASE_ARTIFACTS_[source-alias]_[variable-name]. Read more about the available RM artifact variables.

Next task on my todo list => create a VSTS extension to provide a dedicated build/release task.

Migrating TFVC (TFS on-premises) to Git (VSTS)

In the last couple of months I do get more requests to move TFVC version control history to a git repository in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). The migration from TFVC to TFVC is at the moment possible via the TFS Integration Tools and is not that straightforward to accomplish. Migrating to a git repository is much simpler and is certainly the way to go if you were already planning to adopt git in the future. The migration can be done via Git-TF which is a set of cross-platform command-line tools that facilitate sharing of changes between Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Team Services and Git.

What do you need to get started?

• Download git via https://git-scm.com/downloads
• Download and extract Git-Tf to your computer
• Add the extracted git-tf path to the system environment variable “path”
• Create a new “git” Team Project in VSTS

Migration Steps:

• Open a command-line prompt and navigate to a directory where you want to host the local git repository
• Call git-tf clone to push all TFS changeset info from TFVC to a new local git repo. The first argument is the Team Project Collection url. You pass the TF version control path to the exact branch in the second argument and you end the command with the “deep” flag to ensure that the full history of the branch is moved into separate commits in the git repo. Pass your credentials to connect to TFS and execute the command.

• Once you have a local git repository it’s easy to push it towards an empty central VSTS git repository. First use the git remote add command to link your local git repo to the remote “origin” and afterwards you can push all changes via git push.

Navigate to the Code Hub in your VSTS Team Project and you should see all code history inside the git repo. What’s a big plus is that the original changeset date/time stamps are now part of the git commit info.