Team Services Extensions Roundup – April

Joe Bourne

April 30th, 20170 0

A 6 month high of 30 new Visual Studio Team Services extensions got added to the Marketplace in April. It was really hard to only pick two from such a big set so I encourage everyone to check them all out on the ‘Recently Added’ section of our Marketplace. There are two extensions I want to highlight this month. One is from a well known Visual Studio IDE publisher, the other is the first step our ecosystem has organically taken to fill the AWS integration gap.

NDepend Extension for TFS 2017 and VSTS

You may recognize this publisher from their successful Visual Studio extension, NDepend. NDepend has excelled in helping you estimate technical debt and manage .NET code quality in Visual Studio. Now they bring all of that, and more, to your continuous integration processes in Visual Studio Team Services. NDepend is a static analysis tool for .NET managed code, and comes with a large library of code metrics, as well as a very rich dashboard and dependency graphs.

ndependdashboard — The Dashboard Hub added by the NDepend extension. It includes a rich set of information and every item is drillable

What you can expect from the extension:

A new build task that does the code analysis and code coverage data analysis.
A rich Hub Dashboard that shows the latest diff-able data set for your code quality metrics, with each item allowing drill-down.
Quality Gates is a check of code quality which must be enforced before committing and releasing is allowed. NDepend comes with 12 default suggested Quality Gates.
Over 150 default Rules that check your code against best practices. Write additional custom rules using Code Query over LINQ
Technical Debt and Issues offers a rich interactive drill-down view of your issues and the rules defining them. Group and sort your issues on a varying set of pivots.
Trends charts are provided displaying your tracked Trends for each build. The extension comes with 70 default trend metrics, with the ability to add new ones.
Code Metrics are displayed in a panel for each assembly, namespace, class or method.
Build Summary Recaps are included in each build showing the analysis recap.
Support is provided from a publisher that is fantastic to work with!

AWS S3 Upload

This extension comes as advertised. It adds a useful Build Task allowing you to upload a file to a S3 bucket in AWS. This extension has quickly become a Trending item and gotten great early reviews. There is a big hunger in our ecosystem for more Amazon integration, and this is a good step in the right direction. There are a few setup steps things you’ll need to take care of, but it’s worth it.

awstask — Build task added by this extension. You need to designate the Bucket name, the file to upload, and the S3 Object.

Requirements

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell installed on build machine and script execution enabled. All Windows Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) have the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell pre-installed. https://aws.amazon.com/powershell/
Profile containing keys on build machine (if role is not configured): Run aws configure and set Access Key and Secret Key http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html#cli-using-examples