Maintenance at its limits

Back in the days before Windows 8 and Server 2012, all the patches would quickly consume lots of disk space in the windows installer folder, due to caching of all the files, to make it possible if you needed to uninstall patches.
A common fix back then was to delete the contents, either manually or through some 3.part tools, which could cause inconsistency.

In win 8 and server 2012 Microsoft invented the Thrusted installer and TiWorker process to, among other stuff, maintain the WinSxS folder like cleaning up duplicated or orphaned files and compress the remaining folders.
In addition to that .Net precompiles its intermediate code into native machine code for the updated parts.
Sound pretty good ehh? Well it has some drawbacks…

Continue reading “Maintenance at its limits”

Deploy artifacts without SMB

When doing release management one of the first step is to get the artifacts from your buildjob copied to a remote machine. TFS already have some buildin tasks like Windows machine File Copy or the Azure File Copy task

The Azure file copy task uses the Azure scripts to copy files to the Blob or to the VM itself( it actually copies the files through the Azure LOB storage)

The Windows Machine File copy is using robocopy so it is meant for copying locally through the SMB protocol. However you might be blocked by a firewall that wont allow SMB.

Then PowerShell comes to the rescue. (As always)

Continue reading “Deploy artifacts without SMB”

TFS 2018 RC1 is out!

They are really speeding up at the TFS team. The TFS 2018 RC1 is out and its a go-live, meningen there are full support for production.

There will be major changes like deprecation of XAML build, Sharepoint integration and MTLM

Some of the new features are Maven Package support, Wiki support, New Release management layout, Git forks and so on.

Read the full info here: TFS2018RC1