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....

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....

Another post so I don’t forget how I fixed a problem…. I have been making sure some Selenium UX tests that were originally written against Chrome also work with other browsers. I have had a few problems, the browser under test failing to load or Selenium not being able to find elements. Turns out the solution is to just use the custom driver start-up options, the default constructors don’t seem to work for browsers other theran Chrome and Firefox....

Update 10 May 2021 - Remember that GitHub Issue Forms are in early beta, you need to keep an eye on the regular new releases as they come out. For example, my GitHub Forms stopped showing last week. This was due to me using now deprecate lines in the YAML definition files. Once I edited the files to update to support YAML they all leap back into life GitHub Issues are core to tracking work in GitHub....

It is easy to get your local branches in Git out of sync with the upstream repository, leaving old dead branches locally that you can’t remember creating. You can use the prune option on your Git Fetch command to remove the remote branch references, but that command does nothing to remove local branches. A good while ago, I wrote a small PowerShell script to wrapper the running of the Git Fetch and then based on the deletions remove any matching local branches....