A common question I get when people are using my Release Notes task for Azure DevOps is whether it is possible to get the release notes as a PDF. In the past, the answer was that I did not know of any easy way. However, I have recently come across a command line tool by Max Melcher called AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport that allows you to export a whole WIKI (or a single file) as a PDF. Its basic usage is ...

Disks filling up on our private Azure DevOps agents is a constant battle. We have maintenance jobs setup on the agent pools, to clean out old build working folders nightly, but these don’t run often enough. We need a clean out more than once a day due to the number and size of our builds. To address this, with UI based builds, we successfully used the Post Build Cleanup Extension. However since we have moved many of our builds to YAML we found it not working so well. Turned out the problem was due to the way got source code. The Post Build Cleanup task is intelligent, it does not just delete folders on demand. It check to see what the Get Source ‘Clean’ setting was when the repo was cloned and bases what it deletes on this value e.g. nothing, source, or everything. This behaviour is not that obvious. In a UI based builds it is easy to check this setting. You are always in the UI when editing the build. However, in YAML it is easy to forget the setting, as it is one of those few values that cannot be set in YAML. To make the post build cleanup task actually delete folders in a YAML pipeline you need to ...

During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift‘ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work. Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively Zwift’ing, but it’s other functions were OK. After much fiddling I found the issue was the network connection from my PC up to Zwift and nothing to do with the phone app. But in case it is of any use to others here are the steps I took to ...

I have just released Version 3.1.7 of my Azure DevOps Pipeline XplatGenerateReleaseNotes Extension. This new version allows you to build release notes within a Multi-Stage YAML build since the last successful release to the current (or named) stage in the pipeline as opposed to just last fully successful build. This gives more feature parity with the older UI based Releases functionality. To enable this new feature you need to set the checkStage: true flag and potentially the overrideStageName: AnotherStage if you wish the comparison to compare against a stage other than the current one. ...

The Problem Whilst doing a migration from an on-premised TFS to Azure DevOps Services for a client I had a strange issue with SQLPackage.exe. I had previously completed the dry run of the migration without any issues and started the live migration with a fully defined process and timings for a each stage. When I came to export the detached Team Project Collection DB I ran the same command as I had for the dry run ...

Updated 30/Sep/21 to reflect changes in the Aggregator CLI setup process Updated 27/Mar/22 to fix broken links Background Back in the day I wrote a tool, TFS Alerts DSL, to do Work Item roll-up for TFS. Overtime I updated this to support VSTS (as Azure DevOps was then called), it’s final version is still available in the Azure DevOps Marketplace as the Azure DevOps Service Hooks DSL. So when I recently had a need for Work Item roll-up I did consider using my own tool, just for a short while. However, I quickly realised a much better option was to use the Aggregator CLI. ...

The testing cycle for Release Notes Templates can be slow, requiring a build and release cycle. To try to speed this process for users I have created a local test harness that allows the same calls to be made from a development machine as would be made within a build or release. However, running this is not as simple was you might expect so please read the instruction before proceeding. Setup and Build Clone the repo contain the Azure DevOps Extension. ...

I have added another new feature to my Cross Platform release note generator. Now, when using Handlebars based templates you can optionally get the parent or child work items for any work item associated with build/release To enable the feature, as it is off by default, you need to set the getParentsAndChildren: true parameter for the task, either in YAML or in the handlebars section of the configuration. This will add an extra array that the template can access relatedWorkItems. This contains all the work items associated with the build/release plus their direct parents and children. This can then be accessed in the template ...

The addition of Handlebars based templating for my Cross Platform Release Notes Task has certainly made it much easier to release new features. The legacy templating model it seem is what had been holding development back. In the past month or so I have added support for generating release notes based on PRs and Tests. I am now happy to say I have just added support for the actual files associated with a commit or changeset. ...

Over the weekend I got another new feature for my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Extension working. The test results associated with build artefacts or releases are now exposed to Handlebars based templates. The new objects you can access are: In builds tests – all the test run as part of current build In releases tests – all the test run as part of any current build artefacts or previous to the running of the release notes task within a release environment ...