Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  The Azure Desired State Configuration (DSC) Extension, which can be used to upload and apply a DSC configuration on an Azure VM, was introduced in August 2014. It is currently at Version 2.13 *  Building Azure VM with ARM templates consists of two rough steps: building a JSON template file and executing the New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment cmdlet, which then reads all of the logic inside of this JSON template file to feed the Azure API the parameters it needs to provision a VM...a simple Windows VM will require at least a 140 line template *  Installing Azure PowerShell via WebPi/MSI or Install-Module differs in several ways. One difference is that the WebPi/MSI method installs the PowerShell modules to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\PowerShell\, whereas Install-Module downloads them to C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules. *  Resource Manager APIs and PowerShell modules are incompletely (or simply not) documented...

The MVA video course DevOps: An IT Pro Guide  (Level 300 | Published: 06 June 2014) comes with a great slide deck. The second part of the 5-part series compares TFVC vs Git, TFS vs VSTS (or Visual Studio Team Services, the new name for Visual Studio Online). Click on the images below for a slightly better view of the text or download the related  PowerPoint Presentation  for the slides. It is interesting to note that VSTS being a SaaS based product, the updates to TFS first appear in it before they appear in an installable copy of TFS. Related: *  Notes from the MVA course "Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online" *  Book Review: Pro Team Foundation Service

Github Pricing (click to enlarge image) *  GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service , which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. * The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett. * As of 2014, GitHub reports having over 3.4 million users and with 16.7 million repositories making it the largest code host in the world. It is written in Ruby. *  Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub's investor Andreessen Horowitz, stated that GitHub had been growing revenue at 300% annually since 2008 "profitably nearly the entire way" Visual Studio Online pricing & features   (click to enlarge image) * Microsoft announced the release Visual Studio Online , Microsoft's hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. in November 2013. *  Visual Studio Online expands over Team Foundation Serve...

The Microsoft Virtual Academy course Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online  is a level 300 course that provides an high level overview of Visual Studio Online (VSO) in less than 2 hours. I wish it also dwelled a little on Process templates & covered best practices. Notes from the course and elsewhere - - Visual Studio Online is a cloud-based platform of tools and services that helps you plan, deploy and manage your application. - VSO competes with Github.  GitHub lets developers work for free with public code repositories but there is a charge for those who want to work with private code repositories.  It is possible to migrate a project from GitHub to Visual Studio Online - VSO is free for the first five users and it is an included benefit for MSDN subscriptions. - VSO offers cloud-hosted application lifecycle management (ALM) as a service. It provides TFS (centralized) and Git (decentralized) source control systems . - Visual Studio Online isn't...