Background It is a really useful feature that you can expose Key Vault stored secrets as Azure DevOps pipeline variables via a variable group, but what happens when you do this? And what can you do if you try to expose too many variables? I was recently working on a system where there was an increasing number of Key Vault secrets that were being exposed as variables via a variable group. This was working fine, until I started getting warnings in the following form on Windows based Azure DevOps agents: ...

Background I am using an Azure Function as backend for processing forms submissions from a Hugo static website, to process a simple contact form. I wanted to add reCAPTCHA support, as the site was generating too many spam emails. I also wanted to show a different confirmation pages depending on whether the reCAPTCHA check passed or failed There a good few posts about using an Azure Function as backend for a static web site form. But what I could not find was how to handle the return value from the Azure Function. ...

Problem After deploying a dotnet 6 console app to a production server, I got the following error: Exception: [Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data.Odbc, Version=6.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The system cannot find the file specified.] The strange thing was the same EXE, built on a Microsoft hosted Azure DevOps build agent, was working on the test server and was deployed using the same Azure DevOps Pipeline to both systems. ...

Late last year at (DDDNorth](https://twitter.com/dddnorth) my session had the title ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?’. Between anecdotes, a key theme was tha people too often don’t make sensible diagnostic steps. A problem caused, in my opinion, by the fact they have not been exposed to the fundamentals of how a computer works, due to the way computing is taught today, as opposed to how it was taught in my youth in the 80s ...

The Problem I recently did our regular update of our Azure DevOps Private build agents. It is rare we see problems when we do this, but this time one of our very regularly run builds started to fail when running unit tests. We had not changed the project source code, all the test ran locally in Visual Studio. We had not change the build pipeline YAML - task: VSTest@2 displayName: 'Unit Tests - Services' inputs: testAssemblyVer2: | **\*.unittests.dll !**\obj\** searchFolder: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/src And from the pipeline logs, we could see that the CLI command being generated by the VSTest@2 task was also unchanged, finding 39 DLLs that matched the filter. ...

The Problem I have blogged previously about moving various web sites over to become Hugo Static Sites. Recently one of my site’s, one using the tailwindscss module, GitHub Build and Deployment Workflow started failing with the following error: Start building sites … hugo v0.108.0-a0d64a46e36dd2f503bfd5ba1a5807b900df231d+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2022-12-06T13:37:56Z VendorInfo=gohugoio Error: Error building site: POSTCSS: failed to transform "css/style.css" (text/css): node:internal/errors:478 ErrorCaptureStackTrace(err); ^ SystemError [ERR_SYSTEM_ERROR]: A system error occurred: uv_os_homedir returned ENOENT (no such file or directory) at Object.<anonymous> (/opt/nodejs/16.18.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/clean-stack/index.js:6:61) at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1155:14) at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1209:10) at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1033:32) at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:868:12) at Module.require (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1057:19) at require (node:internal/modules/cjs/helpers:103:18) at Object.<anonymous> (/opt/nodejs/16.18.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/aggregate-error/index.js:3:20) at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1155:14) at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1209:10) { code: 'ERR_SYSTEM_ERROR', info: { errno: -2, code: 'ENOENT', message: 'no such file or directory', syscall: 'uv_os_homedir' }, errno: [Getter/Setter], syscall: [Getter/Setter] } Total in 1653 ms Solution The problem it turned out was that the default version of Node used by the GitHub Actions runner had changed from Node 14 to Node 16. ...

Background It is easy to create an Open Source Project and leave it to gather technical debt as the libraries it depends upon are updated. I have tried to keep on top of updating all my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, and I have to say Dependabot has certainly helped, but I have not been as diligent as I might have been. So, as a Christmas project, I took the chance to start to do a major update of all my extensions. To make sure they used the newer Node16 execution runner (as per the document update process) and to update all the NPM packages used. ...

“You need a license to touch that!”. The case for licensing of individuals within the software engineering profession. Background Back in 2004 I completed my BSc Degree in Computer Science at Bradford University; only 20 years after I started. My year in industry got out of hand! One module I did involved me writing a paper on a legal area concerning computing. I chose to discuss licensing of engineers. Whilst at the DDDNorth community conference last weekend (Dec 2022) I got chatting on aspects of staff development, problem solving and training with a fellow MVP Matteo Emili and I mentioned this paper I had written. We both thought it might be interesting to revisit it and see if it still held true, best part of 20 years on. ...

The Problem I am getting back out in front of audiences again as opposed to doing Teams/Zoom events. So I dug out my trusty Logitech Spotlight presentation remote from the bag where it had been sitting for well over a year. However, there was a problem, it would not pair with my re-built Windows 11 PC. It could not even switch on. A quick search showed I was not alone in having this problem, the Logitech forums showed a lot of angry people. The summary was, if left alone for a few months a Spotlight goes so flat it cannot be charged, and Logitech don’t have a fix, or seem to care. There were a lot of comments about very expensive paper weights. ...

I have recently been working with a client who needed to move Azure DevOps Work Items between Team Projects on different Azure DevOps instances. The only realistic choice was to use the free open source Azure DevOps Migration Tools. I have used these tools before, but it was a while ago, and as it is under active development, I had to relearn a few things. It is fair to say that the learning curve for this tool is steep, but as the documentation does not hide this ...