I recently got a very interesting PR for my Cross-platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Pipelines Extension from Kenneth Scott. He had added a new templating engine to the task, Handlebars. Previous to this PR the templating in the task was done with a line by line evaluation of a template that used my own mark-up. This method worked but has limitations, mostly due to the line by line evaluation model. With the Kenneth’s PR the option was added to write your templates in Handlebars, or stay with my previous templating engine....

Problem I recently tripped myself up whist adding SonarQube analysis to a rather complex Azure DevOps build. The build has two VsTest steps, both were using the same folder for their test result files. When the first VsTest task ran it created the expected .TRX and .COVERAGE files and then published its results to Azure DevOps, but when the second VsTest task ran it over wrote this folder, deleting the files already present, before it generated and published it results....

I wrote recently about Creating Hyper-V hosted Azure DevOps Private Agents based on the same VM images as used by Microsoft for their Hosted Agent. As discussed in that post, using this model you will recreate your build agent VMs on a regular basis, as opposed to patching them. When I came to do this recently I found that the Packer image generation was failing with errors related to accessing packages....

I am really pleased to say that we at Black Marble are again hosting a venue for this year’s edition of the Global DevOps Bootcamp on Saturday May 30th 2020. For those who have not been to a previous GDBC event at Black Marble, or any of the other 70+ venues across the work, what can you expect on the day? A video keynote from an Industry Leader in the DevOps field A local keynote developing the topics of the bootcamp The remainder of the day is made up of team based hands on exercises....

Visual Studio Online is back. Unlike the previous usage of this name, which was an incarnation of what is now Azure DevOps Services, this is actually an editor for code. Just like you might expect it to be! The new VSO, which is currently in preview, is a service running in Azure that allows you to in effect run Visual Studio Code on a Linux VM. Once you have signed into VSO with an MSA and it has created the required Resource Group and VSO Plan in your Azure subscription, you create one or more ‘environments’ that defines the size of the VM to use and which GitHub hosted repo the environment will edit....