The blog of Richard Fennell

This is the blog of Richard Fennell, I am a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and the CTO of Black Marble Ltd a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England. Black Marble specialises in Integration projects using the Azure/Microsoft stack. I blog mostly on the subject of DevOps using Azure DevOps and GitHub.
Richard Fennell (headshot)

ProjectFileIndexer exceptions in SonarQube

The Issue We are running our SonarQube instance as an Azure hosted Docker container. Over the past few weeks we have been seeing intermittent occurrences of the ProjectFileIndexer exception during the SonarQube analysis step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. ##[error]java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to load component class org.sonar.scanner.scan.filesystem.ProjectFileIndexer When I looked closer at the exception stack, I could see at the bottom there was always a timeout error when trying to access the project....

October 31, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Why is my SnipeIT instance suddenly slow?

Background As I have blogged previously, we run a SnipeIT instance to manage our IT assets, hosted in Azure using Docker. This has been working well for us for the past year, but recently we have noticed that the system has become very slow to respond. Looking on the Azure portal, we can see that around the 15th of October the web app’s response times have gone from milliseconds to 10s of seconds...

October 28, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Using Azure Service Connection names that are stored in variables group in Azure DevOps Pipeline

Background If you are using staged deployment in Azure DevOps, you will probably have multiple Azure Service Connections. So, it makes sense that you might want to use a Service Connection name that is stored in a variable group as a parameter to a templated YAML pipeline. # the build pipeline stages: - stage: UAT jobs: - deployment: ARM_Provisioning timeoutInMinutes: 0 environment: 'Staging' variables: - group: UAT pool: vmImage: 'windows-latest' strategy: runOnce: deploy: steps: - template: YAMLTemplates\ProvisionUsingARM....

October 21, 2024 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Editing multiple files in the Azure DevOps UI and committing them in a single commit

One of the most useful, and it seems relatively unknown, features in the GitHub web UI is the ability to edit multiple files in the UI and commit them in a single commit. This is done by loading VS Code in the browser when in the code view by pressing . (the full stop) The reason I find this so useful is that it allows me to make a series of small related changes to a project without having to clone the repository or using a CodeSpace, very useful when editing the related YAML files of reusable workflows in GitHub Actions....

October 18, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Generating Visual Studio SQL Database Projects from the command line

This is is one of those posts I write so I remember how to do something in the future. Background I recently had a need to generate many Visual Studio SQL Database Projects from existing databases. Being a good ’lazy developer’ I wanted to do this from the command line so I could automate the process, but it took me far to long to work out how The Manual Way If you only have one database to import you can do this manually by using the Import option in Visual Studio for an individual SQL Database Project....

September 27, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell