
VSTS is now a Symbol Server - dstaheli
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/11/15/vsts-is-now-a-symbol-server/
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gargravarr
At my previous company, a .Net house using exclusively ASP.Net and SQL Server,
builds were somehow being run on an antique version of Hudson running on
Windows XP. I took over running of the neglected cluster, upgraded to latest
Jenkins, upped the build nodes to Windows 2012 R2 servers and kept a close eye
on the running of the system, but could not help wondering, why are we not
using TFS or its cloud options for our products?

A couple of years later, all developers received full MSDN licenses, which
included use of MS Teams in either form. At the same time, we needed to
replace our SDLC software which was completely obsolete and loathed by most of
the company. I put together a proof-of-concept TFS 2017 instance, imported our
existing tickets with pretty good accuracy and ported some builds over. A
colleague heavily involved in testing then spent some time tying in the test
results and creating reproducible builds. And it worked. Everything tied
together exactly as Microsoft intended it to.

As much as I am a fan of Open-Source, I had to admit this was the right tool
for the company.

Despite all this, the head of development showed no interest, even when he was
told our licensing covered us completely and the bug tracker did not need
licensing. Purely because he disliked the TFS interface, he vetoed my efforts.
That TFS had many, many features that our developers would have found
incredibly useful, made no difference. The web UI wasn't shiny enough for
upper management. Instead, this summer, the company went ahead and purchased a
very expensive SDLC solution elsewhere. This, and many other reasons for being
stonewalled, made me switch jobs.

Shortly before I left that place, and the reason I wrote this story, I
discovered a fileshare on the Jenkins master full of PDB symbols. When I asked
my teammate why it was there, he said he created it because the developers
needed a place to stash the debug symbols. A crude fileshare, no disk
monitoring on it, no cleanups of old build artefacts (which Jenkins was now
doing for us, rather than hacky manual scripts). I just shake my head wearily.
Sometimes the solution is presented to you with all the right ticks on the
checklist, and you walk right on past it because the inner magpie says so.

Cannot say how glad I am that I left that place.

