In the past I have written most of my Azure DevOps scripts calling the Azure DevOps REST API from PowerShell. This has worked, but did involve a lot of JSON payload handling. A better option these days is to look at the AZ CLI and specifically the azure-devops extension, as this does much of the heavy lifting for you. This does not mean that everything is plain sailing though. Today I hit a problem that took me a while to solve. ...

The contents of this book is not at all what I was expecting from the title ‘Accelerate DevOps with GitHub’. Usually books that aim to provide up to date walkthroughs for a specific current tools tend to not place them within the large tapestry of the ecosystem. This is not the case with this book from Michael Kaufmann. Each section is delivered in broadly three parts, which I found really effective ...

Today I made the fateful mistake of offering to try to fix a family members home printer. Family IT, and especially printers, the bane of all IT Professionals. The Problem The system in question was a 10 year old setup made up of a Dell Optiplex desktop currently running Windows 10 and an HP M1132 LaserJet multifunction printer. This had all been working until a couple of weeks ago when the PC failed to detect the printer. The printer was uninstalled, assuming that would fix the problem, but the Add Printer tools could not even find the printer. ...

I am currently upgrading a .NET Core 3.1(LTS) MVC website to run on .NET 6, stepping it through intermediate .NET versions to make sure some EF Migrations were done correctly. Everything upgraded without any major issue until the final step to .NET 6. As soon as I did this my MVC pages failed to render, but no error was reported After much fiddling the solution to the problem was pointed out to me by one of my colleagues. The way MVC is shipped with .NET (Core) has changed from being a NuGet package to being part of the framework. This happened a good while ago, but become a blocking issue with .NET Core. ...

We recently hit a problem when we tried to edit a page on anold Umbraco 7 instance. When we tried to edit a page in the Umbraco web UI we got the error ‘failed to retrieve data for content id 1119’ Now this page had been created a long time ago by a user who had since left the company, and this was the root cause. It seems there is an issue with Umbraco and deleted users. To avoid this problem, it is actually recommended you disable old Umbraco user accounts as opposed to deleting them. ...

I posted recently on my experience moving to Hugo from WordPress. One feature lost in the move were the Wordpress plugins used to automatically post to Twitter and LinkedIn when a new blog post was created. I always found this very useful, so looked or a way to replicate this functionality for static pages. The solution I ended up with was Azure Logic Apps. I created a Logic App with a scheduled triggered that checked my blogs’s RSS feed every 30 minutes. If it found the RSS feed had been updated, I then created a bitly link for the new post’s URL, then posts to Email (as a test), Twitter and LinkedIn. ...

Background Over the years, the Black Marble blog server has been hosted on many platforms. It’s previous incarnation was WordPress, running as a network of sites with an aggregated feed. Of late we had found this slow to serve the first page (due to website start-up time) and there was the constant need to keep the instance patched. The time had come for a new solutions, and we picked Hugo Static Pages. ...

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been. The first issue was I gave it a tiny data disk, this was down to me making a typo in my GB to Bytes conversion when specifying the size. Interestingly, the GHES setup does not initially complain but sits on the ‘reloading system services’ stage until it times out. If you check the /setup/config.log you see many Nomad related 500 errors. A reboot of the VM showed the real problem, the log then showed plenty of out-of-disk space messages. ...

I was recently trying to set up a copy of the Outlook desktop app with two outlook.com email accounts and hit a strange issue. I was able to add the first one without any problems, but when I tried to add the second one I got an error message asking for PIN, and most importantly on the same dialog showing the second outlook.com email address. This is confusing as I know of no way to set a PIN on an outlook.com account. ...

A recent addition to GitHub Actions is the ability to create a custom job summary. Using a simple echo command in a script you can write to the job summary steps: - name: Adding markdown run: echo '### Hello world! :rocket:' >> $GITHUB\_STEP\_SUMMARY Now, this got me thinking. I have a well-used custom release notes extension for Azure DevOps. It has a GitHub Action equivalent, but it does not seem to get as much usage. Would adding support for custom Job Summaries make it more useful? ...