Due to the nature of the build and release services in TFS, strange things can happen.
Just discovered that we had some builds that was marked “retained by release”, as usual, but looking at the details pane, there wasn’t any related deployments, so we wasn’t able to delete those builds.
From time to time, it can be handy to use the Team configuration and members in TFS to set permissions in another application.
If you are stuck on upgrading to TFS 2018 due to the old deprecated XAML based builds, it can be a challenge to see how far you are from the goal of zero XAML builds.
When you have a TFS collection that has been running for a long time, as I do, you end with a lot of shelvesets.
The drawbacks of this is of course, (minor) storage, but it also affects upgrade time.
But instead of manually delete all the old obsoleted stuff manually, Powershell rescues us.
The previous sample scripts on this blog has been about how to use Powershell through the REST API on a on-premise TFS. I’ve got some question about how to connect to Visualstudio Online (VSTS).
All the samples can be modified to connect to VSTS.
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)
Sometimes you need to get the latest successful build and get the download path for the artifact, for e.g. some 3 part tools or as an input for other build jobs.
