Continuous Delivery with TFS: Provisioning a Visual Studio Development Machine

In this instalment of my series on building a continuous delivery pipeline with TFS we look at provisioning a Visual Studio development machine. Although we installed Visual Studio on the TFS admin server to support the build process and you may be thinking you could use this instance, in my experience it's a sluggish experience because of all the other components that are installed. You might also have a physical machine on which Visual Studio is installed and you may be wondering if you could use this. Assuming that there are no complications such as firewalls the answer is a cautious yes -- my initial Azure setup involved connecting to a publicly accessible TFS endpoint and it was mostly okay. In this scenario though your development machine isn't part of your Azure network and the experience is a bit clunky. This can be resolved by configuring a Site-to-Site VPN but that isn't something I've done and isn't something I'm going to cover in this series. Rather, my preference is to provision and use an Azure-based development machine. In fact I like this solution so much I don't bother maintaining a physical PC for Visual Studio research and learning any more -- for me it's Azure all the way.

So if like me you decide to go down the Azure path you have a couple of options to choose from, assuming you have an MSDN subscription. You can create a VM with your chosen operating system and install any version of Visual Studio that your MSDN subscription level allows. Alternatively you can create a VM from the gallery with Visual Studio already installed (in the Portal there is a check box to display MSDN images). The first thing to note is that only MSDN subscriptions get the availability to run desktop versions of Windows as VMs, so if you don't have MSDN you will need to run a version of Windows Server. The second thing to note if you are opting for a pre-installed version of Visual Studio is that just because you see Ultimate listed doesn't mean you have access to it. In order to activate Visual Studio Ultimate you will need to log in to Visual Studio with an MSDN Ultimate subscription or provide an Ultimate licence key. I've been there and suffered the disappointment. I have mentioned this to Microsoft but at the time of writing this hasn't been rectified. With all that out of the way, my preference is to create a VM and install Visual Studio myself as I like the flexibility of choosing what components I want installed. Whichever route you choose, ensure that you add this VM to your domain if you are using a domain controller and that you add the domain account that you will use for everyday access with appropriate privileges. You'll also want to make sure that VS is updated to the latest version and that all Windows updates have been applied.

As a final step you might want to install any other development tools that you regularly use. As a minimum you should probably install the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 Power Tools. These provide many useful extras but the one I use regularly is the ability to perform source control operations from Windows Explorer.

Cheers -- Graham