PowerShell Log Levels Included In TFS 2017 and VSTS Build and Release Logs
We use quite a few custom PowerShell scripts in some of our builds and releases. This led me to ask the question, which PowerShell log levels actually get wr...
Recent Posts
Strongly sign your Visual Studio extension’s 3rd party assemblies to avoid assembly-loading errors at runtime
When trying to create a Visual Studio 2017 version of my Diff All Files Visual Studio extension, I was encountering a runtime error indicating that a module ...
Continuously Deploy Your ClickOnce Application From Your Build Server
ClickOnce applications are a great and easy way to distribute your applications to many users, and have the advantage of offering automatic application updat...
Creating A .PFX Certificate And Applying It On The Build Server At Build Time
There are many project types that require a .pfx file in order to build and/or publish successfully, such as ClickOnce and UWP (Universal Windows Platform) a...
Limit The Number Of C# Tasks That Run In Parallel
Why I needed to throttle the number of Tasks running simultaneously
Fix MSBuild 2015 Compile Taking A Very Long Time
I created the Invoke-MsBuild PowerShell Module (also available in the PowerShell Gallery), and recently added support to use the Visual Studio 2015 version o...
Module to Synchronously Zip and Unzip using PowerShell 2.0
If you search for ways to zip and unzip files using PowerShell, you will find that there a lot of different methods. Some people invoke .Net 4.5 assembly met...
Tell Microsoft To Fix The Sql Server Management Studio “Connect to Server” Dialog Position
If you use Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS) with multiple monitors, you likely run into the issue where the “Connect to Server” dialog window opens up eit...
Find Largest (Or Smallest) Files In A Directory Or Drive With PowerShell
One of our SQL servers was running low on disk space and I needed to quickly find the largest files on the drive to know what was eating up all of the disk s...
Keep PowerShell Console Window Open After Script Finishes Running
I originally included this as a small bonus section at the end of my other post about fixing the issue of not being able to run a PowerShell script whose pat...
Adding a WPF Settings Page To The Tools Options Dialog Window For Your Visual Studio Extension
I recently created my first Visual Studio extension, Diff All Files, which allows you to quickly compare the changes to all files in a TFS changeset, shelves...
Template Solution For Deploying TFS Checkin Policies To Multiple Versions Of Visual Studio And Having Them Automatically Work From “TF.exe Checkin” Too
Get the source code
Saving And Loading A C# Object’s Data To An Xml, Json, Or Binary File
I love creating tools, particularly ones for myself and other developers to use. A common situation that I run into is needing to save the user’s settings to...
“Agent lost communication with Team Foundation Server” TFS Build Server Error
We had recently started getting lots of error messages similar to the following on our TFS Build Servers:
If You Like Using Macros or AutoHotkey, You Might Want To Try The Enterpad AHK Keyboard
If you follow my blog then you already know I’m a huge fan of AutoHotkey (AHK), and that I created the AHK Command Picker to allow me to have a limitless num...
Don’t Write WPF Converters; Write C# Inline In Your XAML Instead Using QuickConverter
If you’ve used binding at all in WPF then you more then likely have also written a converter. There are lots of tutorials on creating converters, so I’m not ...
Get AutoHotkey To Interact With Admin Windows Without Running AHK Script As Admin
March 2023 Update: I’ve found another solution that I prefer over this one. See this post for details.
Provide A Batch File To Run Your PowerShell Script From; Your Users Will Love You For It
Aside - This post has received many tangential questions in the comments. Your best bet at getting an answer to those questions is to check Stack Overflow an...