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)

What are my options authenticating the az devops CLI?

Edited: 4th Feb 2025 to add detail on Azure DevOps Pipelines Service Connection Introduction When automating administration tasks via scripts in Azure DevOps in the past I would have commonly used the Azure DevOps REST API. However, today I tend to favour the Azure DevOps CLI. The reason for this is that the CLI wrappers the REST API in such a way that it is easier to use and more consistent....

January 31, 2025 · 6 min · Richard Fennell

Passing Azure DevOps WI field names in PowerShell to Az DevOps CLI as variables

The Issue The Azure DevOps CLI command az boards work-item update can take a list of fields as a set if value pairs e.g. az boards work-item update --id 123 --fields Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort=10 However, if you try to replace the field name with a variable in PowerShell like this $fieldname = "Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort" az boards work-item update --id 123 --fields $fieldname=10 you will get an error like this The –fields argument should consist of space separated “field=value” pairs....

January 27, 2025 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Signing files in GitHub Actions

Background I recently wrote about the changes I had had to make to our Azure DevOps pipelines to address the changes required when code signing with a new DigiCert certificate due to new private key storage requirements for Code Signing certificates Today I had to do the same for a GitHub Actions pipeline. The process is very similar, but there are a few differences in the syntax and the way the secrets are stored....

January 20, 2025 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Re-authenticating Microsoft Authenticator after swapping your phone

This one of those posts that is more a note to self as I keep forgetting how to do this, but I hope it helps others. Background I use Microsoft’s Authenticator to provide MFA on a number of accounts. I recently swapped my Android phone and had to, after restoring a backup, re-authenticate some accounts on the new device. This was a simple process for most accounts, just a case of validating the code generated by the new device, but I had a problem with the entries where my Black Marble Entra ID account was a guest in other company’s Entra ID directories....

January 20, 2025 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Why am I getting no private key is available error when I try to digitally sign files in my Azure DevOps Pipeline?

Background It is becoming increasingly important to sign files digitally to ensure that they have not been tampered with, to secure the software supply chain. This is something we have done for a good while as a step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. However, recent(ish) changes in the way certificates are issued has meant we have had to revise our approach. The Problem We used to use a .PFX file, stored as an Azure DevOps secure file, that contained the public and private keys and was accessed using a password, to sign our files....

December 11, 2024 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Inject a step into Web Deploy

I really like Web Deploy, it is a powerful tool for injecting parameters whilst deploying web applications to both Azure or an on-premise IIS Server. Every project is different, and sometimes you need to be able to inject a step into the Web Deploy package creation process to complete some extra step. This can be done by adding a target to the .csproj project file. The following example shows how you could sign the assemblies before the Web Deploy package is created....

December 4, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

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