My Top 5 Blog Posts of 2017

2017 was an exciting year full of DevOps and Azure projects, learning, and sharing. One of the most exciting areas of focus for me this year was around incorporating security controls into the CI/CD process. I did a number of talks on the subject including getting to speak at the All Day DevOps 2017 virtual conference. I'm most proud to have had the opportunity to write an article on Continuous Security Validation in your CI/CD pipeline as you can see below became my number post of 2017. These were the most popular posts I wrote last year and it was fun to see how they were received. We don't have comments turned on these posts but always look forward to discussing any of these on Twitter at @mikedouglasdev.

‍Adding Continuous Security Validation to your CI/CD Pipeline Article
‍This post highlights my article on docs.microsoft.com about continuous security validation and how the conversation has changed from doing security validation at the end of a project to incorporating into every step of your CI/CD pipeline. There's a lot more on this story I plan to tell in 2018.

‍Performance and Load Test your REST APIs with Visual Studio and Swagger
‍Just because Visual Studio Performance and Load Testing hasn't had too many changes recently, doesn't mean you can't teach it a few new tricks. I found creating web performance tests using the swagger pages an easy way to create load tests for RESTful services. Performance testing posts over the years have been very popular and I have several more to write in 2018.

‍Change Screen Resolution Utility Is Now Available On Chocolatey
‍Earlier this year, I made some updates to this utility that can the screen resolution of machines used for automated tests. Furthermore, I wanted a better install experience. Chocolatey was the most delicious and best choice, so I published the utility there. We use this extensively in our Azure VMs for UI automated testing.

‍Using Visual Studio Team Services to Manage Your Projects at Home
‍I always try to see the positive side of every situation. In this case I turned the bad luck of one of my trees falling on my house into some DevOps fun by sharing how I use VSTS to manage (or mismanage in this case) my home projects. The truth is that VSTS is a great tool for managing any kind of project or backlog of work.

‍VSTS and TFS 2017 ALM and DevOps Hands On Labs
‍Rounding off the top 5 was my post on sharing the information on the VSTS and TFS Hands on Labs exercises. If you are looking for a quick way to learn about the capabilities of VSTS and TFS, this is one of my favorite ways to learn new features and try to keep up with all of the new features being delivered.

I have two additional posts that I would like to mention that didn't make the Top 5 but I think are noteworthy.

‍Get the Insiders Edition and Previews for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Team Services
This was a post I wrote on 10/30 that was fun to pull together the ways to try and stay ahead of the curve and keep up with the innovation in Visual Studio, VSCode, and VSTS. I'm sure it comes as no surprise the versions mentioned in the post are already out of date. Thankfully the ways to keep up to date are still valid.

‍Tokenizing Angular applications to work with VSTS Release Management Part I
‍This 3 part series I wrote was technically last year but I finished it on 12/31. They have been popular posts throughout the year and we used a very similar technique for a React project we started a couple months ago.

So, what's on tap for 2018? More DevOps and Azure….I imagine just even faster and more changes from Microsoft and the industry. I hope everyone has had a great 2017 and I'm looking forward to an even better 2018.