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....

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....

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 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....

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.

I was reminded recently of the hoops you have to jump through to run UWP unit tests within an Azure DevOps automated build. The key steps you need to remember are as follows Desktop Interaction The build agent should not be running as a service it must be able to interact with the desktop. If you did not set this mode during configuration this post from Donovan Brown shows how to swap the agent over without a complete reconfiguration....

Whilst adding SonarQube analysis to a large project I started getting memory errors during the analysis phase. The solution was to up the memory available to the SonarQube Scanner on the my build agent, not the memory on the SonarQube server as I had first thought. This is done with an environment variable as per the documentation, but how best to do this within our Azure DevOps build systems? The easiest way to set the environment variable `SONAR_SCANNER_OPTS` on every build agent is to just set it via a Azure Pipeline variable....

Introduction The use of variables is important in Azure DevOps pipelines, especially when using YML templates. They allow a single pipeline to be used for multiple branches/configurations etc. The most common form of variables you see is are the predefined built in variables e.g. $(Build.BuildNumber) and your own custom ones e.g. $(var). Usually the value of these variables are set before/as the build is run, as an input condition. But this is not the only way variables can be used....