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Showing posts from January, 2015

Useful fields in the TFS Database

If you ever need to retrieve the parameters (and respective values) of a test case (for reporting purposes for example), the database table to read is Tfs_<CollectionName>.dbo.WorkItemLongTexts . It contains the HTML/XML field values for each workitem. The only missing part is the ID of the actual field you want to retrieve : FldId 10018 contains the definition of the parameters FldId 10029 contains the values of the parameters

Deploy an ASP.NET MVC Web Application to Azure Website using Release Management for TFS

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There are a lot of articles about the integration of an Azure VM into Release Management for TFS. What if you simply want to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application without the need to provision a dedicated machine. It turns out to be quite simple. One of the most efficient way to do it is to create the initial deployment from Visual Studio and then pick up the piece to build a RM template. My Web Application is quite simple: a database, a Entity Framework Code First model all sitting inside the ASP.NET MVC application. Like all deployments, the main process is: - generate the Web Deploy Package with placeholders for configuration (connection string, parameters, etc.) using TFS Build (or whatever build system you have). - Deploy to the staging machine (using a agent-based or agent-less machine) - Run the MS Deploy CMD file with the appropriate parameters to trigger the deployment on Azure. The reason I use a staging machine as the basis for the CMD is that it allows me to restrict th