Editing multiple files in the Azure DevOps UI and committing them in a single commit

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....

October 18, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Generating Visual Studio SQL Database Projects from the command line

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....

September 27, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Showing Bicep Linting Issues as Errors and Warnings in Azure DevOps Pipelines

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....

September 3, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

How to run your own maintenance job on Azure DevOps pipelines (Revisited now using Workload Identity federation)

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...

August 29, 2024 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Problem running Playwright UX tests on hosted Github Actions Runners

The Issue Whilst refreshing an end-to-end devops demo, one I use for both Azure DevOps and GitHub, I hit a problem. The new Playwright UX Tests, that were replacing old Selenium ones, were failing on the GitHub hosted runner. The strange thing was the same tests worked perfectly on: My local development machine The Azure DevOps hosted runner And strangest of all, a GitHub self hosted runner The Solution Adding some logging to the tests showed the actual issue was that on the GitHub hosted runner the code to count the rows in an HTML table was always returning 0....

August 8, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell