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Revisions:
#1 – 2018.09.07 Create base table with details received to date.
#2 – 2018.09.08 Add Mike Douglas.
#3 – 2018.09.11 Add Giulio, Geoff and Igor.
#4 – Add Darren, Oren, Ken, and Shimail
#5 – Add Clementino, Jakob, and Suliman
#6 – Add Brian Randell

The scenario

We are talking about a massive eCommerce web application (built with ASP.Net Core) that faces the extra challenge of not being able to leverage public cloud technologies. The development team for this eCommerce platform consists of 30 developers which contribute from two locations (onsite & nearshore). They are sharing an on-prem TFS 2018 with other dev-teams but have their dedicated build server. The application itself runs on Windows behind an IIS webserver.

Beside using latest ASP.Net Core technology this is pretty much the classical way how application are getting developed and deployed. The application is ready to be containerized, but external dependencies do not allow a deployment to a Docker-hosted environment at the moment.

How VSTS & Azure still enable DevOps

As the platform will have a massive user load it is absolutely crucial to test the application under load on a regular base starting already early in the development process. But the initiative of getting a dedicated on-prem environment with (1st) the load-generator agents and (2nd) the application itself to run the load against would probably have died due to complexity on an early stage.

To unlock this situation we have chosen a fully cloud based solution. As a prerequisite all relevant interfaces of the application have been mocked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_object). Then the application gets deployed to an Azure VM (automated though TFS Release Management) and the cloud-based load-test from VSTS simulate user-load for the application running on the Azure VM. In addition to this Application Insights (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/) is activated only on the application instance running on this Azure VM what provides us dozens of additional metrics while the application is under load.

Continuously more and more important is security testing and especially considering the OWASP (https://www.owasp.org) threats. Executing scans with the ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy, https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy/wiki/Downloads) again requires hardware for this proxy-software as well as for triggering the requests.

Extending the scenario from above with a second Azure VM which hosts the proxy and a VSTS build definition which makes use of the test task coming with this VSTS extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kasunkodagoda.owasp-zap-scan) is our easy and efficient solution to run OWASP security tests on a regular base.

What if…

With this solution cloud based security- and load-tests are possible although no data (not even source code) is stored in the public cloud. But without any boundaries in leveraging public cloud (VSTS & Azure) the ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) process could still be much more efficient:

1. Containerizing the application and running it as micro-services on a managed infrastructure (e.g. AKS, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/) would give you full flexibility in terms of scalability and provisioning additional environments by reducing the operational effort to rare minimum.
2. The execution of the mentioned Security- & Load-Tests could be orchestrated as part of the existing build-, test- and release-pipeline
3. When working on VSTS you automatically profit from the newest features and get rid of upgrading TFS once or twice a year.

• Access your profile menu option and click on "Preview features"

• From the menu, turn on or off the available features in preview (these change depending on Account or user selection, your current ring and the available features)

• Explore how to progressively expose your VSTS Extension releases in production to validate, before impacting all users
• Enable preview features.

• Gaps are filled as the products and documentation continue to mature ()
• Value of solutions becomes less than the effort to maintain them (no value)
• Passion and bandwidth of associated volunteers fades (no energy)
• We forgot all about the solution (no need)

Recently deprecated solutions

We have deprecated the following solutions in our Library of tooling and guidance solutions (aka.ms/vsarsolutions):

• ALM Assessment Guidance (use aka.ms/devopsassessment instead).
• Device Testing Guidance
• DevOps Workbench
• Team Foundation Build Guidance
• TFS 2010 Monitoring Management Pack
• TFS Process Template Customization Guide
• Unit Test Generator Tool
• Visual Studio Architecture Tooling Guide and Extension

Solutions we’re planning to deprecate

We’re investigating the state, value, and feasibility of deprecating the following solutions:

• Branch Visualization extension – Move to OSS and let the community take it over?
• Build Usage extension - Challenging to synchronize build usage data with product billing
• Sample Data extension - Challenging to keep it up to date with product (consider VSTS Demo Data generator instead)
• Migration of RM assets from RM server to VSTS - Dated – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient
• Secure SonarQube VM with Azure SQL DB - Dated – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient
• Technical Debt Management / SonarQube (aka.ms/vsartdsq) – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient

Thoughts?

See please uninstall our deprecated extensions for deprecated VSTS extensions.

Area

• This extension adds a series of widgets (CFD, Lead, Cycle, Velocity, Burndown and Burn up) that can be used on your dashboards.
• For added functionality, you can build your own Power BI dashboards as detailed in the article: Connect to VSTS with Power BI Data Connector. We'll cover this gem on a future

• Add the extension from the marketplace by searching for "Analytics"

• After installation, you will have the new widgets available

• Open a dashboard and enter Edit mode
• Add the widgets and save

• Analytics Extention for VSTS. Get it from the marketplace
• Connect to VSTS with Power BI Data Connector article 
• More on Power BI https://powerbi.microsoft.com

Feedback and Edit

You’ll notice on our docs.microsoft.com that you now have an option to give us (1) Feedback and to (2) Edit the content on the associated github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs repo.

List of articles

Here’s a list of the refreshed articles. We’d love your thoughts on what’s missing, what can be improved, and what’s dated or obsolete. Or even better, contribute a pull request with your revisions

Guidance

• Map TFVC actions to Git
• Branching strategies for Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and how to select an effective strategy
  

Version Control

• Manage branching strategies in TFVC for DevOps
  
• Manage feature isolation in TFVC
• Migrate from Subversion (SVN) to Git
• Move Git repositories between Team Projects
• Remove large binaries from Git

DevOps

• Add Continuous Security Validation to your CICD Pipeline
  
• Progressively expose your features using feature flags
  
• Progressively expose your releases using deployment rings
  

Thanks for reading!

Figure 1 – Before and after a decimal to the number of days remaining

Community engagement

Other changes

1. We expanded the color choice to no longer allow just eight predefined colors, but to allow selection of any other color
2. We added a choice to change the background color of the Countdown Widget when a deadline gets closer than a specified number of hours or days

Future work

1. Expand the rounding options when displaying the number of days left. Currently you have the possibility to either round the number of days to the closest whole number or display the number of days with one decimal. We intend to add two more options, namely to always round the number up or to always round down.
2. We are also considering piloting an addition to the Countdown Widget. We intend to add a new, third widget to the extension: A fancy countdown as shown in figure 2. This will be an animated countdown of the time remaining to either the end of the sprint or to a custom date and time. Figure 2 – Fancy countdown

Here we are again applying the lessons learned: The reason we are pushing this new look as a new, third widget is to prevent breaking existing user dependencies on Countdown Widget.

Thanks to the reviewers of this post: Lia Keston, Niel Zeeman