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Occasionally it is necessary to access services running on the host machine from a container. You may be inclined to use localhost to reach the host, but this will not work as the container itself is localhost. Here is how to access host services from a container running on Windows Server 2016. This applies to containers running with NAT networking mode. This is the default, so unless you explicitly use something else, this should work for you. ...

Occasionally it can be useful to access a running container. On Linux it is possible to open a bash session with a new instance of the container’s shell with docker exec -it [containername] bash. Because the Docker interface works the same way on Windows it is surprisingly easy to open a command prompt for a running container. Simply execute docker exec -it [containername] cmd. When you want to exit again, just use the exit command. ...

With Windows Server 2016 available it’s time to find out all the little details when using Docker to administrate containers. A common scenario is accessing a private/internal hosted Docker Registry protected with a self-signed certificate (Details). Here is how you enable the Docker daemon and CLI on Windows Server 2016 to use your certificate when talking to the registry. Have your certificate (.crt) file available on the server Copy it to C:\ProgramData\docker\certs.d\[hostname][port]\ca.crt Example with internal registry on DNS and port myinternalregistry:5000: ...

The goal of this article is to describe a fast way to get started with creating an end-to-end continuous deployment setup with Visual Studio Team Services and Azure. With few resources and in little time you should be able to get a full setup going that deploys a web application to Azure without any downtime for users. The article is split into three parts. This first part will provide a brief overview of the practices applied and services used in the setup. The remaining two parts will go into the details of setting it up. The parts are outlined as follows: ...

This saturday I had the opportunity to give a talk at Office 365 Saturday Denmark 2016, on Continuous Deployment with Visual Studio Team Services and Azure. Even though it was a last minute session I put together as a result of another speaker having cancelled due to illness I think it turned out great. Lot’s of good questions and interest! By request, the slides are available for download. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

In this post I have gathered ten useful features of Visual Studio Team Services. Many of these are not new features, but you had to dig a little to find out they were there. In the recent months the UI has received several improvements and some of these are now more visible, without having to dive deep in the collection administration. There are also a couple of recent additions that should make your life easier! ...

Recently, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) opened up the ability to make extensions with distribution through the Visual Studio Marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com). The marketplace and API is currently in preview, but I will show how easy it is to create an extension with some of the currently available features. Extensions are made using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You may also choose to go with TypeScript. The official documentation is also heavy on using TypeScript, so help is available either way. The official tool for packaging and managing extensions is written using Node.js and distributed via NPM. Why is all of this great? It means you can create extensions regardless of what platform you are sitting on (OS X, Windows, Linux). ...