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....
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....
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...
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....
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....