Creating a new project in Azure DevOps with your desired process template is straightforward. However, it is only the start of the job for most administrators. They will commonly want to set up other configuration settings such as branch protection rules, default pipelines etc. before giving the team access to the project. All this administration can be very time consuming and of course prone to human error. To make this process easier, quicker and more consistent I have developed a process to automated all of this work. It uses a mixture of the following: ...

I recently had the need to get the email address of the approver of a deployment to an environment from within a multi-stage YAML pipeline. Turns out it was not as easy as I might have hoped given the available documented APIs. Background My YAML pipeline included a manual approval to allow deployment to a given environment. Within the stage protected by the approval, I needed the approver’s details, specifically their email address. ...

Another post so I don’t forget how I fixed a problem…. I have been making sure some Selenium UX tests that were originally written against Chrome also work with other browsers. I have had a few problems, the browser under test failing to load or Selenium not being able to find elements. Turns out the solution is to just use the custom driver start-up options, the default constructors don’t seem to work for browsers other theran Chrome and Firefox. ...

Update 10 May 2021 - Remember that GitHub Issue Forms are in early beta, you need to keep an eye on the regular new releases as they come out. For example, my GitHub Forms stopped showing last week. This was due to me using now deprecate lines in the YAML definition files. Once I edited the files to update to support YAML they all leap back into life GitHub Issues are core to tracking work in GitHub. Their flexibility is their biggest advantage and disadvantage. As a maintainer of a projects, I always need specific information when an issue is raised. Whether it be a bug, or feature request. ...

It is easy to get your local branches in Git out of sync with the upstream repository, leaving old dead branches locally that you can’t remember creating. You can use the prune option on your Git Fetch command to remove the remote branch references, but that command does nothing to remove local branches. A good while ago, I wrote a small PowerShell script to wrapper the running of the Git Fetch and then based on the deletions remove any matching local branches. Then finally returning me to my trunk branch. ...

I have just release 3.46.4 of my Azure DevOps Cross-Platform release Notes task which adds support for generating release notes based on the results of Azure DevOps Test Plans. There has been support in the task for automated tests, run as part of the build or release process, for a while. However, until this release, there was no way to generate release notes based on manual tests. Manual Test results are now made available to the templating engine using two new objects: ...

I have spent too long today trying to track down an intermittent “SQLite Error 5: ‘database is locked’” error in .Net Core Entity Framework. I have read plenty of documentation and even tried swapping to use SQL Server, as opposed to SQLite, but this just resulted in the error ‘There is already an open DataReader associated with this Connection which must be closed first.’. So everything pointed to it being a mistake I had made. ...

There are good reasons why you might wish to move an existing Azure DevOps organisation from one region to another. The most common ones are probably: A new Azure DevOps region has become available since you created your organisation that is a ‘better home’ for your projects. New or changing national regulations require your source stored in a specific location. You want your repositories as close to your workers as possible, to reduce network latency. One of these reasons meant I recently had to move an Azure DevOps organisation, so followed the documented process. This requires you to ...

One of my most popular Azure DevOps Extensions is my Release Notes Pipeline task. This allows the creation of release notes using information obtained from the Azure DevOps API and formatted using a Handlebars Template. Given the popularity of GitHub Actions, I got to wondering whether porting this extension was viable? Well the release of my new Generate Release Notes with a Handlebars Template action shows that it was. The basic concept of this new action is the same as for the older task, get information on the pipeline/workflow run using the API and then format it using a Handlebars template. However, the information that can be returned is different. But this stands to reason as GitHub is not Azure DevOps. This is especially true when you consider the differences between the simplicity of GitHub Issues and the complexity, and variability of format, of Azure DevOps Work Items ...

Really please to say that my DDD2020 session is now available to stream. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xaV3dFoQdV8 Thanks to the organisers and sponsors that allowed this event to ahead this year in this difficult year.