This one of those posts that is more a note to self as I keep forgetting how to do this, but I hope it helps others. Background I use Microsoft’s Authenticator to provide MFA on a number of accounts. I recently swapped my Android phone and had to, after restoring a backup, re-authenticate some accounts on the new device. This was a simple process for most accounts, just a case of validating the code generated by the new device, but I had a problem with the entries where my Black Marble Entra ID account was a guest in other company’s Entra ID directories. ...

Background It is becoming increasingly important to sign files digitally to ensure that they have not been tampered with, to secure the software supply chain. This is something we have done for a good while as a step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. However, recent(ish) changes in the way certificates are issued has meant we have had to revise our approach. The Problem We used to use a .PFX file, stored as an Azure DevOps secure file, that contained the public and private keys and was accessed using a password, to sign our files. ...

I really like Web Deploy, it is a powerful tool for injecting parameters whilst deploying web applications to both Azure or an on-premise IIS Server. Every project is different, and sometimes you need to be able to inject a step into the Web Deploy package creation process to complete some extra step. This can be done by adding a target to the .csproj project file. The following example shows how you could sign the assemblies before the Web Deploy package is created. ...

The Issue We are running our SonarQube instance as an Azure hosted Docker container. Over the past few weeks we have been seeing intermittent occurrences of the ProjectFileIndexer exception during the SonarQube analysis step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. ##[error]java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to load component class org.sonar.scanner.scan.filesystem.ProjectFileIndexer When I looked closer at the exception stack, I could see at the bottom there was always a timeout error when trying to access the project.protobuf file from SonarQube. ...

Background As I have blogged previously, we run a SnipeIT instance to manage our IT assets, hosted in Azure using Docker. This has been working well for us for the past year, but recently we have noticed that the system has become very slow to respond. Looking on the Azure portal, we can see that around the 15th of October the web app’s response times have gone from milliseconds to 10s of seconds ...

Background If you are using staged deployment in Azure DevOps, you will probably have multiple Azure Service Connections. So, it makes sense that you might want to use a Service Connection name that is stored in a variable group as a parameter to a templated YAML pipeline. # the build pipeline stages: - stage: UAT jobs: - deployment: ARM_Provisioning timeoutInMinutes: 0 environment: 'Staging' variables: - group: UAT pool: vmImage: 'windows-latest' strategy: runOnce: deploy: steps: - template: YAMLTemplates\ProvisionUsingARM.yml parameters: AzureResourceGroup: $(AzureResourceGroup) AzureServiceConnection: $(AzureServiceConnection) - stage: PROD jobs: - deployment: ARM_Provisioning timeoutInMinutes: 0 environment: 'Staging' variables: - group: PROD pool: vmImage: 'windows-latest' strategy: runOnce: deploy: steps: - template: YAMLTemplates\ProvisionUsingARM.yml parameters: AzureResourceGroup: $(AzureResourceGroup) AzureServiceConnection: $(AzureServiceConnection) With a template YAMLTemplates\ProvisionUsingARM.yml that uses the AzureServiceConnection variable ...

One of the most useful, and it seems relatively unknown, features in the GitHub web UI is the ability to edit multiple files in the UI and commit them in a single commit. This is done by loading VS Code in the browser when in the code view by pressing . (the full stop) The reason I find this so useful is that it allows me to make a series of small related changes to a project without having to clone the repository or using a CodeSpace, very useful when editing the related YAML files of reusable workflows in GitHub Actions. ...

This is is one of those posts I write so I remember how to do something in the future. Background I recently had a need to generate many Visual Studio SQL Database Projects from existing databases. Being a good ’lazy developer’ I wanted to do this from the command line so I could automate the process, but it took me far to long to work out how The Manual Way If you only have one database to import you can do this manually by using the Import option in Visual Studio for an individual SQL Database Project. ...

Introduction Previously Rik Hepworth has posted on ‘Importing bicep lint output as test results in Azure DevOps pipelines’. In his post he showed how you could move from using the ARM-TTK to validate ARM templates to using the built inBicep Linter. Rik’s solution involved taking the Bicep Lint output and converting it via the .SARIF format to JUnit so that it could be published to an Azure DevOps pipeline run as a set of test results. ...

Introduction Last year I posted on how to create your own Azure DevOps maintenance jobs. This solution has been working well for me, until the Azure DevOps Service connection’s Entra ID Service Principle secret expired. So, I thought it well worth revisiting the creation of this maintenance job but this time using Workload Identity federation to authenticate, and hence never again have to worry about the secret expiring. Updated Setup Process Note: This is a modification to the creation of the service connection, but the core the maintenance job setup remains the same as in my original post ...