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Let’s admit something, we humans are really lazy, but computer scientists are even more so. That’s why we try to automate as much as possible, sometimes too much. A very common phrase is:

If you do something more than twice, automate so you don’t have to do it a third time.

We can extrapolate this phrase to our home. How many times have we forgotten a light on? How many times have we lost the remote control? What if we leave the house for a few days and we get robbed?

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You get to the office. Like every day, you turn on your computer, check the emails, the Pull Request on your team, and finally, what task you have to do today. The project, a messaging system between employees of a large company.

Include administrator role to view and manage private messages between users. (1 Day)

You ask yourself, how is it possible that the Product Owner has forgotten to include a detailed description, 1 Day? I don’t think so.

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A few days ago I learned a valuable lesson about what to do and not in databases. A few small tips that will help us to optimize our SQL Server databases and thus make queries faster.

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Computer scientists are vague by nature, in fact, the computer was born with the purpose of sorting information and automate the tasks of sorting and processing data and information obtained from them. Given this fact there is a clear principle:

If you have to do the same task more than once, automate it.

If to this we add the fact that I hate having many open tools, which in turn do many different things, and that perhaps would not have to do for themselves, we enter a state of insanity causing chaos on the developer’s desktop.

Let’s try to cut the amount of open tools to make it easier and more productive to advance our project with a series of posts.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services CLI

In the No Country For Geeks team, we use Git and publish code through Pull Request in Visual Studio Team Services. We are not going to enter into why the Pull Request is one of the best ways to advance the team as a code, commitment to projects and shared knowledge: it is well demonstrated.

To see the list of the Pull Request in which the team works in the different projects, simply access the section https://{account}.visualStudio.com/_pulls. The problem with this page is that it does not have notifications, therefore, despite being a good practice to access the page as soon as you start the workday and review the pending Pull Request of your team, it is true that in an 8-hour day they can arise a lot of Pull Request and at the end you always have the page open.

What we do so far is to have notifications with some alerts via email, which is currently what Microsoft allows in its tool. However, we can tell you about emails, in most cases we have a rule that all notices that happen in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) are passed to a silenced folder that is reviewed every several days because they are not notices as important as to take them into account.

As I said we use Git, and also as we are purists we usually use the console to perform commands on the repository. And if we do not need to have open the electronic mail, nor the web browser to make the query of the Pull Request pending of the team? Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services CLI joins the game.

VSTS CLI is a new command line interface for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2017 Update 2 and later.

What this means. Well roughly it is an interface for our console that adds extra functionalities to work with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server.

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With the decline of code version control systems such as Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and the rise of others such as Git, we are facing a common and recurring problem in TFVC repositories:

How do we change from an existing TFVC repository to a Git repository, without affecting all the work already done, to all the code tracking, simply, and quickly, and most importantly, without affecting the team?

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