Avanade DevOps HOL

These are the hands on labs associated with the Avanade DevOps Practitioners course. This is based to a large part on the PartsUnlimitedHOL but simplified to use the Visual Studio MVC sample application. It does not use the PartsUnlimited HOL, but we want to acknowledge that project's contribution to this project.

NOTE: JULY 2018 - Microsoft is previewing a new look for VSTS so if you are using this new look, the instructions may be different and the screen shots will definitely be different.

NOTE: SEPT 2018 - Microsoft has rebranded VSTS as Azure DevOps (the marketing team wanted to use the buzword). Some of the materials in these labs still refer to VSTS and/or may have references to older UI. This is the new reality of development. What worked last week may not work today so it is important that you understand the principles behind the tools, not just the ability to blindly follow the steps.

Course Pre-requisites

If you are taking the Avanade DevOps Practitioners course, then the following are pre-requisites for the beginning of the course. The pre-requisites are straightforward but a few of the tasks take some time so doing this before the class will save time during the course and allow you to get the maximum value from the class.

1. Make sure your Azure subscription is enabled and you can log in and create resources.
   Azure Portal
   If you are using your Avanade email to access the Azure portal, then you will need to create a new Active Directory instance. This is because the labs require creating an enterprise application id and individual users do not have permissions to create enterprise applications on the Avanade AD instance.
   • In the Azure Portal, Create a Resource of Azure Active Directory with a meaningful name. This is probably something you will use as a general purpose AD instance (i.e. not just for the class) so you may want to name it appropriately.
     • For more information, you can reference Create an Azure Active Directory tenant. DO NOT execute steps in Create some users in your Azure Active Directory tenant section.
   • Once the AD instance is created, click on the All services menu item and search for Subscriptions. Choose the subscription that is tied to your MSDN account (this is the one you will use for the class). If you don't see the correct subscripiton, you might need to switch directories.
   • On the Subscriptions' Overview panel, choose the ->Change directory link and select the new AD instance that you just created.
     • For more information, you can reference Associate an existing subscription to your Azure AD directory
2. An active Azure DevOps account.
   Sign up for Azure DevOps
3. Verify that PowerShell v5+ is installed along with the AzureRM modules.
   • Install-Module Powershellget -Force
   • Install-Module -Name AzureRm -AllowClobber
   • Import-Module -Name AzureRM
4. Using an Azure development environment is strongly encouraged. This avoids conflicts with your existing development environment. Complete the steps listed below in the Azure Development Environment.
5. Complete the Getting Started lab. This will make sure that your environment is correctly configured and ready to execute the remaining labs in the course.
6. Configure a private VSTS agent from the Private Agent lab.

Azure Development Environment

You can accomplish these labs using Visual Studio 2017 on your local computer, but you may want to consider doing the labs using an Azure VM as the development machine. This not only keeps you from having to make changes to your local environment, but it gives you additional experience using Azure. You can either configure an Azure development environment on your own or an easy way to do this is to use PowerShell ISE and execute the following commands. This will create a new Azure resource group and then configure an Azure VM with Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2017 Community edition. It will also use Chocolatey to install a collection of other tools and applications. Review and modify the script to suit your own needs before executing such as changing the VmVisualStudioVersion to VS Enterprise and Window Server 2016 (VS-2017-Ent-Latest-WS2016) or changing the ResourceGroupLocation to "South Central US"

Note: Not all VM SKUs are available in every region. You can get the list of SKUs in a particular location with the following PowerShell commands.

$locName="South Central US"
Get-AzureRMVMImageSku -Location $locName -Publisher "MicrosoftVisualStudio" -Offer "VisualStudio" | Select Skus

Note: Sometimes this all works great but other times, the Chocolatey packages do not install when the VM is first created so you may need to run choco install for the individual packages to complete the environment setup.

Note: Run PowerShell as an administrator.

Login-AzureRmAccount
Select-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionName andrewmo
$VmName = "DevOpsHOL"
$DnsLabelPrefix = "<uniqueDNSName>"
$VmIPName = $VmName+"-ip"
$VmAdminUserName = "<VmAdminUserName>"
$VmAdminPassword ="<TopSecretPassword>"
$ResourceGroupName = "DevOpsHOL"
$ResourceGroupLocation = "East US 2"
$SecureStringPwd = ConvertTo-SecureString $VmAdminPassword -AsPlainText -Force
New-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $ResourceGroupName -Location $ResourceGroupLocation -Verbose -Force
New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName `
    -TemplateUri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Avanade/DevOpsHOL/master/azure-rm/azuredeploy.json" `
    -VmName $VmName `
    -VmSize "Standard_D2s_v3" `
    -VmVisualStudioVersion "VS-2017-Comm-Latest-Win10-N" `
    -VmAdminUserName $VmAdminUserName `
    -VmAdminPassword $SecureStringPwd `
    -DnsLabelPrefix $DnsLabelPrefix `
    -ChocoPackages 'visualstudiocode;notepadplusplus;googlechrome' `
    -Force -Verbose

Once the script above completes, you can use the following to start the VM and check to see that everything was installed correctly.

Start-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $VmName
while((Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $VmName -Status | `
    select -ExpandProperty Statuses | `
    ?{ $_.Code -match "PowerState" } | `
    select -ExpandProperty DisplayStatus) -ne "VM running")
{
    Start-Sleep -s 2
}
Start-Sleep -s 5 ## Give the VM time to come up so it can accept remote requests
$vmip = Get-AzureRmPublicIpAddress -Name $VmIPName -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName
$hostdns = $vmip.IpAddress.ToString() ## $vmip.DnsSettings.Fqdn
cmdkey /generic:TERMSRV/$hostdns /user:"$VmName\$VmAdminUserName" /pass:$VmAdminPassword
Start-Process "mstsc" -ArgumentList "/V:$hostdns /f" ## use /span to use both monitors

Finally, when you are done, you can use the following scripts to

1. Shut down the VM to minimize Azure charges

Stop-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $VmName -Force

2. Delete the entire resource group when done with the labs or to start fresh.

Remove-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $ResourceGroupName

Once you have a development environment set up, dive right in to the first Getting Started lab.