Over the past couple of weeks, I have shipped three user-requested features for my Azure DevOps Release Notes Extension Generate multiple documents in a single run You can now specify multiple templates and output files. This allows a single instance of the task to generate multiple release note documents with different formats/content. This is useful when the generation of the dataset is slow, but you need a variety of document formats for different consumers. ...

The Issue Today I came across a strange issue with a reasonably old multi-stage YAML pipeline, it appeared to be cancelling itself. The Build stage ran OK, but the Release stage kept being shown as cancelled with a strange error. The strangest thing was it did not happen all the time. I guess this is the reason the problem had not been picked up sooner. If I looked at the logs for the Release stage, I saw that the main job, and meant to be the only job, had completed successfully. But I had gained an extra unexpected job that was being cancelled in 90+% of my runs. ...

The new GitHub Issues Beta is a big step forward in project management over what was previously possible with the old ‘simple’ form of Issues. The Beta adds many great features such as: Project Boards/Lists Actionable Tasks Custom Fields including Iterations Automation However, one thing that is not available out the box is a means to automatically add newly created issues to a project. Looking at the automations available within a project you might initially think that there is a workflow to do this job, but no. ...

This is another of those posts to remind me in the future. I searched the documentation for this answer for ages and found nothing, eventually getting the solution by asking on the SonarQube Forum When you link SonarQube into an Azure DevOps pipeline that is used from branch protection the success, or failure, of the PR branch analysis is shown as an optional PR Check The question was ‘how to do I make it a required check?’. Turns out the answer is to add an extra Azure DevOps branch policey status check for the ‘SonarQube/quality gate’ ...

This is a somewhat different post to my usual technical ones… In December 2017 I had major surgery. This was to remove an adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC) that had grown on one of my adrenal glands and then up my inferior vena cava (IVC) into my heart. Early on I decided, though not hiding the fact I was ill, to not live every detail on social media. So, it is only now that I am back to a reasonable level of health and with some distance that I feel I can write about my experiences. I hope they might give people some hope that there can be a good outcome when there is a cancer diagnosis. ...

Yesterday GitHub released Codespaces as a commercial offering. A new feature I have been using during its beta phase. Codespaces provides a means for developers to easily edit GitHub hosted repos in Visual Studio Code on a high-performance VM. No longer does the new developer on the team have to spend ages getting their local device setup ‘just right’. They can, in a couple of clicks, provision a Codespace that is preconfigured for the exact needs of the project i.e the correct VM performance, the right VS Code extensions and the debug environment configured. All billed on a pay as you go basis and accessible from any client. ...

Background We regularly re-build our Azure DevOps private agents using Packer and Lability, as I have posted about before. Since the latest re-build, we have seen all sorts of problems. All related to pulling packages and tools from NuGet based repositories. Problems we have never seen with any previous generation of our agents. The Issue The issue turned out to be related to registering a private PowerShell repository. $RegisterSplat = @{ Name = 'PrivateRepo' SourceLocation = 'https://psgallery.mydomain.co.uk/nuget/PowerShell' PublishLocation = 'https://psgallery.mydomain.co.uk/nuget/PowerShell' InstallationPolicy = 'Trusted' } Register-PSRepository @RegisterSplat Running this command caused the default dotnet NuGet repository to be unregistered i.e. the command dotnet nuget list source was expected to return ...

As I am sure you are all aware the preview of Visual Studio 2022 has just dropped, so it is time for me to update my Parameter.xml Generator Tool to support this new version of Visual Studio. But what does my extension do? As the Marketplace description says… A tool to generate parameters.xml files for MSdeploy from the existing web.config file or from an app.config file for use with your own bespoke configuration transformation system. ...

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. ...