Wow, 5 years goes by quickly. 5 years ago since I converted my purple badge to Blue! Or as Craig reminds me, it’s been 4.99 years and I’ll get my 5-year crystal at Microsoft after I come back 😎

It’s been such an amazing time with so much growth in my life. It has also been a really great extension of the work before I joined Microsoft as a Microsoft MVP, Consultant, Product/Release Department Manager, that I’ve had in the DevOps, ALM, Agile, TFS, and Visual Studio Team Services space for 12 years.

At the same time, the ending of this chapter is bittersweet. There are so many amazing people that I have worked with and learned from that I will truly miss. I’m hopeful our paths will cross again.

Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server have become so amazing especially when I look at the last 2–3 years. Out of all of the fun projects & products I’ve worked on, I’m very glad to have made sure that I hit the two main improvements to dev team’s lives:

1. Launch a hosted SaaS service at Microsoft for development teams (the first developer SaaS service at Microsoft!)
2. Ensure an easy on-ramp to that SaaS service from existing on-premises data

I saw just how difficult it was for dev & IT teams to maintain their on-premises engineering systems in my many years of enterprise consulting. It’s amazing to have launched Visual Studio Team Services so teams don’t have to worry about it ever again. It’s even more amazing to have a front row seat to the engineering transformation at Microsoft towards a One Engineering System that is Visual Studio Team Services. The story has been amazing to share with so many.

In addition to being a part of the transformation that Microsoft has been making with developers. I mean, we open sourced .NET! It’s awesome to see that we have been moving in the right direction and even “getting our groove back.”

Developer Startups

I had the opportunity to work on my MBA at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington during these years. It was a really amazing experience for me. One of the things that I picked up was a better understanding around entrepreneurship and a lot of the mechanics of founding successful startups. (As much as you can influence at least!) I walked away with a more concrete understanding and passion. Starting a company became approachable to me and I have shifted to bringing experiences into my life to drive me towards that mission.

Meeting so many awesome founders of amazing startups in the developer space has been a highlight of the last few years. I’m so impressed with how generous and compassionate each of them are to help others in reaching even higher in their success.

In my time at Microsoft, I have also loved diving deeper into not only the technical aspects of amazing developers tools and services, but also the many non-technical pieces that are important. Developer services are insanely tough to get right especially as you start to think about being successful in the enterprise space. There was a great article that Ethan Kurzweil wrote recently that captured what I had been observing as a set of Eight Laws for Developer Platforms and really resonated with me. Brilliant!

Programming the next startups to the language of developers: Eight Laws for Developer Platforms

Next Adventure

That brings me to my next adventure: I’m joining Algorithmia as Head of Product! I have been really impressed with the work they are doing and I became even more impressed with each of the amazing team members.

I’m joining Algorithmia as Head of Product!

Algorithmia is a public marketplace of algorithms written by developers from all of the world. Under the hood, there’s some amazingness to make sure each of the microservices run at scale. It’s pretty freakin’ cool. There’s also an on-premises version that enterprises and large organizations are starting to pick up with success. There’s so much more possible here and I’m looking forward to it’s future.

A good chunk of the notable algorithms currently available focus on helping developers with solving artificial intelligence & machine learning challenges. Data science groups have been a primary group that has helped Algorithmia get to where it is today. This space is really interesting to me. I’m looking forward to diving into this world!

We are at a very early point in where AI & ML are at. There’s so much more that developers and Product Managers can leverage to transform their applications into truly being much more valuable to customers and intelligent.

There’s a lot of growth opportunities ahead for Algorithmia and I’m excited to be a part of that success. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead!

Thank you so much to each of the mentors in my life. You are amazing and I couldn’t be more appreciative of your guidance. It’s crazy and exciting at the same time. One of my favorite mentors shared this thought with me that fits well for these times in our lives:

The good stuff is often on the other side of fear.

Please feel free to follow me here, on Twitter, LinkedIn and what’s happening with Algorithmia on the Blog: http://blog.algorithmia.com/

Ed’s Next Adventure was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Build conference was a fun & amazing week in Seattle this year. It was great seeing everyone who came to our sessions and the booths. Talking with everyone at the booth, I got the impression that many of your are excited in transforming your development process and that we are investing in the right places to help make your lives better as you adopt DevOps practices. That’s always so exciting to hear so thank you for continually sharing your thoughts!

I’ll summarize the highlights below and I also had the chance to record two podcast episodes so I’ll update when those are published too.

Dmitry Lyalin on Twitter

DevOps is important or something 😎 #MSBuild

DevOps Foundational Session

Sam Guckenheimer and I had the great opportunity to be able to deliver the DevOps Foundational session at Build with all of the awesome announcements of Microsoft’s latest investments for enabling every team to easily adopt DevOps practices. We made a lot of announcements and then gave a roadmap of the other sessions at Build that would be diving in deeper for each of the announcements. Be sure to check them out!

The recording of our session is available on Channel 9 and on the Visual Studio YouTube channel so be sure to check them out.

DevOps for every team

DevOps Announcements

• Easy Continuous Delivery with Azure Web Applications
• Git History Graph
• Maven Support in Package Management
• Extended Build/Release Workflow & Editor with New Pipeline Visualization
• Deployment Groups Using Agent-Based Deployments (and no costs for the agents!)
• Delivery Plans are Generally Available (without any additional costs)
• Encryption at Rest in Visual Studio Team Services for Source Repos, Work Items, Build, and Release Artifacts
• Deploying Applications to Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Chef Integration with Deployment Groups

Team Services Feature Updates

Related Sessions at Build

• DevOps for Every Team
• Continuous Delivery on Microsoft Azure
• Confidence at Speed: Visual Studio 2017 and your Continuous Integration Pipeline
• Bridging the Gap Between Apps & Infrastructure with Monitoring Solutions in Microsoft Azure (Application Insights)
• Git at Scale
• Build a CI/CD Pipeline from Visual Studio
• Package Management with Visual Studio Team Services

Eric Fisher on Twitter

Not often you get to meet a guy who uknowingly mentored you in past jobs&roles. Thanks @edblankenship for making my #MSBuild!

Benjamin Boost on Twitter

There are some cool new features for #VSTS thanks for giving us a tour @edblankenship at #MSBuild with @FlorianBaderDE

Josh Carlisle on Twitter

Lost of #devops goodness got dropped today in the session with @edblankenship. #MSBuild . Shared an internal team dashboard in #VSTS Cool!

Mattias Karlsson on Twitter

Now time for some #DevOps, front row seats to see @SamGuckenheimer and @edblankenship do their magic at #MSBuild

DevOps at Microsoft Build 2017 was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ed K

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/06/15/Blog+Up+And+Running.aspx

Blog up and running was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Connect your site to site VPN.
2. Configure your VPN appliance to use the targeted domains IP as the DNS
3. Join the domain form the computer properties the usual way except, instead of using the pre-2000 domain name ie “Network”, you need to use the fully qualified name ie “MyNetwork.com”

Now if newly joined PC is on a different subnet than you Domain Controller you will need to do this in order to access internal servers/PCs via a remote connection by name:

Go to \System32\Drivers\etc\ Look for the file name “hosts”. In that file you will need to map your Servers/PCs name and IP address.

Keep in mind if you join your PC to a domain while at the domain site and not thru VPN, then take it offsite, you will not need to do these steps. This is only for joining a PC connected via VPN that has never been joined before.

Ed K.

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/06/18/Join+Computer+To+Domain+Across+Site+To+Site+VPN.aspx

Join computer to domain across site to site VPN was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well have I got a solution for you. Follow these steps:

1. Create a command file with this information

@echo off

@echo *****************************************************************

@echo ** Add to register

@echo *****************************************************************

:Again

@if .%1.==.. goto Xit

@dir %1 /b

@C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\gacutil /i %1

@Shift

@goto Again

:Xit

@echo *****************************************************************

@Pause

2. Click start — run and type in “sendto”

3. Drag and drop the command file to that location

4. BANG! Now you can simple right click a file and select “Send To” — “InstallToGac.cmd”

BizTalk guys should really appreciate this one :)

Enjoy,

Ed K.

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/06/21/Got+The+Install+To+GAC+Blues.aspx

Got the, “Install to GAC blues”? was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. If your Orchestration project and .Net assembly project are in the same solution. Build/Rebuild solution that contains the Orchestration project and your .Net assembly project. Make sure your .Net assembly project is in debug mode. This can be configured in the ‘Configuration Manager”. Then, Delete their dll from GAC and install the new ones. Now you can debug by attaching to the process “BTSNTSvc.exe”.

2. If your Orchestration project and .Net assembly project are in different solutions then you will need to change the versioning from the default VS configuration. To change this, open your projects “AssemblyInfo.cs” file and change [assembly: AssemblyVersion(“X.X.X.*”)] to a hard coded value such as[assembly: AssemblyVersion(“1.0.0.1”)]. Make sure your .Net assembly project is in debug mode. This can be configured in the ‘Configuration Manager”. Then, Delete their dll from GAC and install the new ones. Now you can debug by attaching to the process “BTSNTSvc.exe”.

Ed K.

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/06/22/BizTalk+2004+Debugging.aspx

BizTalk 2004 Debugging was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyways, here are the tracks I went to:

Programming with the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) — David Walker

Good overview as to what to expect with WCF. I like the easy configuration of remoting and the ability to switch to web services. If anyone has done remoting in 1.1, you know the headache of configurations and implementation. WCF looks very promising.

WCF buzz word of the day:

WCF A,B,C’s

(A)ddress

(B)inding

©ontext

Practical Business Application of DNN — Jason Kergosien

DNN rocks, enough said. I love DNN because it is designed so well and the community support is awesome. I see DNN becoming a huge contender against SharePoint Portal, well, at least the current version of SharePoint. The track offered a very high level view of the features, the main thing I took from this session was the fact that there is a DNN users group here in Dallas J J http://dallas.dnnug.net/. I will be a regular at this group from now on.

I was only able to go to two tracks due to the wife wanting me to spend more time with her and less time with computer stuff…… anyone have that problem?

In closing, great job Dallas Code Camp and great job Omar for making it happen. I look forward to the next one. Hopefully, I will not be so busy with projects that maybe I can be a speaker. Here are the topics that I plan on speaking about when I get the time:

• Dot Net Nuke
• Team Foundation Server / VSTS 2005
• Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
• Principles of OOP and how it can help achieve a better SOA.

Ed K.

A.K.A. Eddie Kisinger

A.K.A. Edward Kisinger

A.K.A. CodeMonkey

J

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/06/29/Dallas+Code+Camp+Review.aspx

Dallas Code Camp Review was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My professional objective in life is to provide more productivity and efficiency to people, developers, and processes. I won’t get all philisophical but I think that is how mankind will prosper :)

Enough of that! From time to time, I’ll add new commentary about new tools that I have found and ones that I use from daily in my developer life and in school. There are some that I absolutely love more than anything else and just can’t live without… some people even think I work for these companies since I am such a proponent! (I don’t)

So until later, be more productive and efficient in your development!

Ed B.

Tools and Toys was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Start Server in single user mode :
sqlservr -m

RESTORE DATABASE YourDB

FROM YourBackUpDevice

WITH NORECOVERY
GO

— If you have diff backups here is where you can add, since we are using WITH NORECOVERY

— Remeber to restore them in order :)

RESTORE LOG YourDB

FROM YourBackUpDevice

WITH RECOVERY, STOPAT = ‘Jul 12, 2006 10:00 AM’ ← — — — what ever time before the mishap
GO

Of course you can do all this fun stuff via the GUI (and have the EM “not responding”) but keep it real and use SQL statements in QA; if you really want to keep it real, use osql to run your statements:)

Ed K.

AKA

Eddie Kisinger

Edward Kisinger

CodeMonkey

Originally authored by Ed Kisinger at https://edsquared.com/2006/07/13/SQL+Restore.aspx

SQL Restore was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m telling you… CodeRush and Refactor Pro are definitely two of my most favorite tools! But I really don’t work for DevExpress… I’ll blog later on both of them and some of the tools that I use from day to day that are built upon DX Core which is the foundation for both of their products and many other small tools. If you haven’t looked in DX Core (which is free) and you build or will build a Visual Studio add-in then you should definitely give it a shot.

My next plan for a coding tool that I could use from day to day is adding comments to code files in the format that I always use. There is actually a tool that uses DX Core that does this called CR_Commenter but the bad thing: It’s only for C# code. I thought about rewriting it for VB developers (and myself.)

Ed B.

CodeRush and Refactor Pro! was originally published in EdSquared on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.