There are still a few spaces left at the Yorkshire Global DevOps BootCamp Venue hosted at Black Marble Come and learn about all things cool in DevOps, including Video keynote by Microsoft Local keynote: Breaking down the Monolith Hackathon/HandsOn DevOps challenges. The hands-on part with be based on a common application where we try to solve as many challenges as possible, including ideas like How to containerize an existing application How to add telemetry (app insights) to the application and gather hypothesis information How to use telemetry to monitor availability How to use feature toggles to move application into production without disrupting end users How to use release gates How to make DB schema changes Use Blue Green Deployments And there is free lunch too!...

In the past I have blog on the subject of using advanced unit test mocking tools to ‘mock the unmockable’. It is an interesting question to revisit; how important today are units tests where this form of complex mocking is required? Of late I have certainly seen a bit of a move towards using more functional style tests; still using unit test frameworks, but relying on APIs as access points with real backend systems such as DBs and WebServices being deployed as test environments....

Background I have a VSTS build extension that can apply a VSTS generated build number to Android APK packages. This takes a VSTS build number and generates, and applies, the Version Name (a string) and Version Code (an integer) to the APK file manifest. The default parameters mean that the behaviour of this task is to assume (using a regular expression) the VSTS build number has at least three fields major....

Today I have released a major new release, V2, of my VSTS Cross Platform Extension to build release notes. This new version is all down to the efforts of Greg Pakes who has completely re-written the task to use newer VSTS APIs. A minor issue is that this re-write has introduced a couple of breaking changes, as detailed below and on the project wiki oAuth script access has to be enabled on the agent running the task There are minor changes in the template format, but for the good, as it means both TFVC and GIT based releases now use a common template format....

The Issue Azure is a highly resilient service, and VSTS has excellent SLAs. However, a question that is often asked is ‘How do I backup my VSTS instance?’. The simple answer is you don’t. Microsoft handle keeping the instance up, patched and serviceable. Hence, there is no built in means for you to get a local copy of all your source code, work items or CI/CD definitions. Though there have been requests for such a service....