SonarQube 6.0 and the StyleCop plugin

For one of our projects we use the StyleCop plugin for SonarQube during the analysis. As you can see it was recently deprecated.

I successfully updated the instance used by this product to SonarQube 6.0, when I was told an exception was raised while building:

To make things worse, there are no workarounds or quick fixes to unblock it as you can see from here. The reason behind this is because it isn’t using the .NET Compiler Platform.

Long story short – the plugin is deprecated and it won’t work with SonarQube 6.0. You can either disable the plugin and keep SonarQube 6.0 running or revert back to SonarQube 5.6.1.

SonarQube analysis of Java code with VSTS

As we know, we can use VSTS to build Java code as well as .NET code thanks to the Maven instance provided by the service. It is one of the reasons why we can forget about the build engine with VSTS – it just works.

If I use Maven on VSTS I don’t even need to add a SonarQube task in the Build Definition. All I need to do is to tick the checkbox and point Maven to my SonarQube instance:

This is literally all I have to do. Maven is already configured so I will get my SonarQube analysis in two clicks:

Package Management in TFS15 RC1

If there was a missing feature in TFS 2015, it was the lack of an integrated Package Management solution. Long are these days, the Package Management extension is bundled in TFS 15 RC1!

You just need to install it via your Local Extension Gallery and you are good to go:

You can then create a new feed:

and you are going to get a very nice guidance page to get started:

These are the default permissions:

After that you’ll add the feed as usual in Visual Studio:

so you can start pushing something up there!

Delivery of stuff via NuGet package is more and more frequent these days and you had to rely on a third-party tool like ProGet (on-premises) or MyGet (in the cloud). It is great to have it integrated in Team Foundation Server, extending the ALM platform with out-of-the-box features.

Metatasks in TFS 15 RC1

It isn’t really about TFS 15 RC1 this time, but now the UI is totally out for it so it is very prominent there is a very nice feature I usually see being overlooked when talking about the new build: meta-tasks.

Meta-tasks were added a couple of weeks ago to the service, and they are a very easy way of collating a set of tasks you keep repeating in your build definitions.

For example, let’s say you start a VM and then extract files to it all the times:

You can group this as a meta-task so you can reuse this set of tasks elsewhere:

Once a meta-task is created its configuration is retained, so you can just drop the meta-task in the definition and you are ready to go!

Meta-tasks can be managed in the same hub as Build and Release Definitions…

…and they come with their own set of ACLs, so you can restrict access to them if you want.

The very nice side effect is that once you start creating your meta-tasks and make them available to the team, you can start bringing a new Definition up to speed very quickly because you already have some building blocks to use instead of relying on heavy documentation and long configurations with variables and such.

Easy HTTPS with TFS 15 RC1

There are a number of changes in TFS 15 RC1, and one I really like is the HTTPS configuration.

When you configure the Application Tier you can now select the bindings you want:

Clicking on the dropdown shows all the configurations – HTTP, HTTPS or both:

with the possibility of selecting the certificate straight from the wizard!

You can also change the bindings, the virtual directory and the URL if needed:

It is just a convenience, true, but it is really handy to use instead of doing this