Background When working with Azure DevOps, you may need to access the REST API if you wish to perform scripted tasks such as creating work items, or generating reports. Historically, you had to use a Personal Access Token (PAT) to do this. If you look in my repo of useful Azure DevOps PowerShell scripts you will find all the scripts make use of a function that creates an authenticated WebClient object using a passed in PAT token....

Background We use Lability to build Windows Server images for our test labs. Lability makes use of Desired State Configuration (DSC) to build the VM images. Part of this process is for Lability to download DSC modules, as ZIP files, from a NuGet feed such as PowerShell Gallery to inject into the created VM image. Historically, we have stored our own private DSC modules on an internally hosted NuGet server. However, we wanted to move these modules to a private Azure DevOps Artifacts feed....

I make every effort keep all my Azure DevOps Pipeline extensions reliable as I know they are used by many people, but mistakes happen. Yesterday I released an updated version of my ReleaseNotes task that introduced a bug if the pipeline produced no artifacts. I am pleased to say I have fixed the bug, and addressed this gap in my test coverage. However, this did mean for about 12 hours if you are using this task in a pipeline that did not produce artifacts, maybe one that just deployed consumed artifacts from other pipelines, you had a failing pipeline....

Background At Black Marble we have our own private build agents, but they are built using the same Packer process as the Microsoft hosted ones. I recently rebuilt our agents to match the latest version of the hosted agents, and I ran into an issue with some .NET 3.1 based x86 MSTests. The tests were failing with the following error: A total of 34 test files matched the specified pattern. ##[error]Testhost process exited with error: A fatal error occurred....

Background I was recently trying to use PowerShelGet Install-Package to install a module from an Azure DevOps Artifacts hosted PowerShell Gallery using the following script # For authentication use a PAT as the password, UID can be anything $PATcreds = Get-Credential Register-PSRepository -Name BM -SourceLocation 'https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/<org>/_packaging/PowerShell/nuget/v2' -PublishLocation 'https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/<org>/_packaging/PowerShell/nuget/v2' -InstallationPolicy Trusted Install-Package BlackMarble.Package -Source BM -Credential $PATcreds The script did not work I was getting the error Install-Package : Cannot find the path ‘C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\936930114\BlackMarble....