Release of my video on 'Introduction to GitHub Actions'

I recently posted on my initial experiences with GitHub Actions. I had hoped to deliver a session on this subject a DDD 14 in Reading , I even got so far as to propose a session. However, life happened and I found I could not make it to the event. So I decided to do the next best thing and recorded a video of the session. I event went as far as to try to get the ‘DDD event feel’ by recording in front of a ’live audience’ at Black Marble’s offices....

October 10, 2019 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

A first look at GitHub Action - converting my Azure DevOps tasks to GitHub Actions

Introduction GitHub Actions open up an interesting new way to provide CI/CD automation for your GitHub projects, other than the historic options of Jenkins, Bamboo, Team City, Azure DevOps Pipelines etc. No longer do you have to leave the realm of GitHub to create a powerful CI/CD process or provision a separate system. For people familiar with Azure DevOps YAML based Pipelines you will notice some common concepts in GitHub Actions....

September 10, 2019 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Strange issue with multiple calls to the same REST WebClient in PowerShell

Hit a strange problem today trying to do a simple Work Item update via the Azure DevOps REST API. To do a WI update you need to call the REST API Using the verb PATCH With the Header “Content-Type” set to “application/json-patch+json” Include in the Body the current WI update revision (to make sure you are updating the current version) So the first step is to get the current WI values to find the current revision....

August 29, 2019 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Authentication loops swapping organisations in Azure DevOps

I have recently been getting a problem swapping between different organisations in Azure DevOps. It happens when I swap between Black Mable ones and customer ones, where each is back by different Azure Active Directory (AAD) but I am using the same credentials; because I am either a member of that AAD or a guest. The problem is I get into an authentication loop. It happens to be in Chrome, but you might find the same problem in other browsers....

August 13, 2019 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

You can’t use Azure DevOps Pipeline Gates to check services behind a firewall

I have recently be working on a release pipeline that deploys to a server behind a corporate firewall. This is done using an Azure DevOps private build agent and works fine. As the service is a basic REST service and takes a bit of time to start-up I though a gate was a perfect way to pause the release pipeline until service was ready for the automated tests. However, I hit a problem, the gates always failed as the internal server could not be resolved....

July 25, 2019 · 1 min · Richard Fennell