Handle your NuGet packages’ qualities with Release Views

Are you building NuGet packages for your tools, utilities and libraries? Check.

Are you using SemVer for versioning? Check.

Then you might want an easy way of offering your (internal) packages, sorting them between Release and Prerelease for example. Release Views is what you are looking for.

What is really brilliant is that you already have a baseline set: Release and Prerelease. You don’t have to configure anything, it is already there for you.

What makes lots of sense IMHO is to divide them into Release, Prerelease and CI.

That’s because even if we would all love to have a single feed where you can get all the packages in an independent fashion, it is highly likely that some users might not need a CI package but something more refined instead.
With the latter it is clear that the package is not as good as a beta, making it easier to section your offer for the user as you like. CI is really bleeding edge sometimes, and I believe it is good to have it separated from other builds.

A note on TFSConfig OfflineDetach

I already mentioned the very useful TFSConfig OfflineDetach in the past. Today I used it once again, and I realised a very important information is missing.

What you need to remember is that the Configuration Database you need to use is the one which has the Collection you want to detach in it. And it must be offline as well.

So in today’s situation (moving a collection across domains in a new instance) I had to restore the configuration database as well as the collection’s.

PRs and ‘Unable to queue Build’ with VSTS

This should never happen, but if it does…

Just go checking the PR settings to verify that there actually is a build linked!