Making SonarQube Quality Checks a required PR check on Azure DevOps

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?...

September 21, 2021 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My cancer story – thus far

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....

August 23, 2021 · 14 min · Richard Fennell

But what if I can't use GitHub Codespaces? Welcome to github.dev

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....

August 12, 2021 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

How I dealt with a strange problem with PSRepositories and dotnet NuGet sources

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....

July 16, 2021 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Porting my Visual Studio Parameters.xml Generator tool to Visual Studio 2022 Preview

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....

June 22, 2021 · 3 min · Richard Fennell