It’s been just shy of a year since I made my first commit to github to start the powerdelivery project. For those of you new to my blog, powerdelivery is a free toolkit that extends Microsoft Team Foundation Server enabling your development and IT operations teams to continuously deliver releases of your IT assets (software, CMS systems, BI solutions etc.) to your customers. It uses Windows PowerShell and YAML (yet another markup language) to provide a configuration-driven platform and can even do scaled deployment of windows services and web sites across farms and clusters.
If you’ve followed the project before but yet to use it, there have been many improvements made and defects fixed in the past month and I’ve got some exciting resources that are becoming available to make it easier to use and even more powerful.
New online help for powerdelivery
Over the past couple of months, I’ve created a basic site using twitter bootstrap to host the documentation for powerdelivery on github pages. The site is a major improvement over the wiki and has everything you need to begin using it. You can find the new online help page right here.
Visual Studio Extension
I’ve also created an extension for Visual Studio that allows you to view the status of each of your environments, promote builds, and add new deployment pipelines to existing Microsoft Team Foundation Server projects. The extension still has a few quirks but is stable for the most part and ready for use in 2010 or 2012. You can install it from chocolatey here.
Getting started video
Lastly, I’ve created a getting started video that shows you how to get powerdelivery installed and configured, and to create your first pipeline. This video alone will not be enough to build your continuous delivery pipeline, but it’s a great walkthrough of the Visual Studio extension and what powerdelivery gives you. You can watch the video below via YouTube (watch on YouTube for HD).