Ithaqua posted:

I've been working with the Release Management stuff a ton for the past 18 months. If you're using the agent-based model, stop right now and start considering how you can transition it to PowerShell or DSC scripts ("vNext" releases). The agent/fine-grained workflow model is being totally abandoned in TFS 2015 Update 1 in favor of a new release system that's closely modeled after the new build system (in fact, it's the exact same task system -- a build action can be a release action and vice versa). The idea is that you'll have your deployment scripts be in DSC/PowerShell/Chef/Puppet/Octopus/whatever and use the release tooling in TFS to orchestrate and manage releases, but not deployment. The release tooling will not help you deploy your software at all, there will be no built-in tasks for "set up a website" or anything like that. If you want to set up a website, write a DSC script, source control it, and invoke it as a release task.

The ALM Rangers are kicking off a project to create migration guidance and tooling next week, but it's going to be a shitshow for the existing users. I'm donating a bunch of code to the project because I foresaw this problem a while back and wrote a bunch of proof of concept code for doing migrations knowing we'd need it someday.