Background We have for many years based our Azure DevOps build and release pipelines on on-premise agents. This was done to provide a means to scale up each agent using ‘bigger & faster’ local VMs then the Microsoft Hosted agents provided, and to utilise spare Hyper-V hosts we had after moving services such as SharePoint to Office 365. To provide consistency of build agent experience to our developers, we decided we wished to use the same VM images on our on-premise agents as used by the Microsoft’s hosted agent pools....

Azure DevOps Server 2022.2 has recently been released. Unexpectedly this minor 2022.2 release includes a change in supported versions of SQL, SQL2017 support has been dropped. So, if someone attempted an upgrade from 2022.1 to 2022.2 they will get the error “TF255146: The SQL Server instance you specified (nnnnn) is version ‘SQL Server 2017 RTM’, which is not supported by this version of Azure DevOps Server. For more information about supported versions of SQL Server, visit https://www....

The Issue Yesterday I posted about converting ARM output variables to Azure DevOps pipeline variables Whilst using the pattern I discussed we hit an interesting problem. On my test pipeline I had the following YAML and it was working as expected. - task: PowerShell@2 displayName: Obtain Azure Deployment outputs inputs: targetType: 'inline' script: | if (![string]::IsNullOrEmpty( $env:deploymentOutputs )) { $DeploymentOutputs = convertfrom-json $env:deploymentOutputs $DeploymentOutputs.PSObject.Properties | ForEach-Object { $keyname = $_.Name $value = $_....

The Issue Historically, we have used Kees Schollaart’s ARM Outputs Azure DevOps task to convert the output from an ARM template deployment into a variable that can be used in a subsequent Azure DevOps pipeline task, using the general form - task: AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3 displayName: Deploy the main template inputs: deploymentScope: 'Resource Group' azureResourceManagerConnection: 'ARMConnEndpoint' subscriptionId: '$(SubscriptionId)' action: 'Create Or Update Resource Group' resourceGroupName: '$(ResourceGroup)' location: '$(AzureRegion)' templateLocation: 'Linked artifact' csmFile: '$(Pipeline....

Introduction I have previously blogged a good deal on Azure DevOps variable evaluation, see here and here, but the saga continues… When variables exist Today I realised, something I guess should have been obvious, that when you manually queue a run, pre-defined variables such as $(Build.SourceBranchName) are not available until the pipeline is compiled and starts running. This is because though there is a value in UI branch combo but this value is not in $(Build....