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One of my most popular Azure DevOps Extensions is my Release Notes Pipeline task. This allows the creation of release notes using information obtained from the Azure DevOps API and formatted using a Handlebars Template. Given the popularity of GitHub Actions, I got to wondering whether porting this extension was viable? Well the release of my new Generate Release Notes with a Handlebars Template action shows that it was. The basic concept of this new action is the same as for the older task, get information on the pipeline/workflow run using the API and then format it using a Handlebars template. However, the information that can be returned is different. But this stands to reason as GitHub is not Azure DevOps. This is especially true when you consider the differences between the simplicity of GitHub Issues and the complexity, and variability of format, of Azure DevOps Work Items ...

Really please to say that my DDD2020 session is now available to stream. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xaV3dFoQdV8 Thanks to the organisers and sponsors that allowed this event to ahead this year in this difficult year.

I was reminded recently of the hoops you have to jump through to run UWP unit tests within an Azure DevOps automated build. The key steps you need to remember are as follows Desktop Interaction The build agent should not be running as a service it must be able to interact with the desktop. If you did not set this mode during configuration this post from Donovan Brown shows how to swap the agent over without a complete reconfiguration. ...

Whilst adding SonarQube analysis to a large project I started getting memory errors during the analysis phase. The solution was to up the memory available to the SonarQube Scanner on the my build agent, not the memory on the SonarQube server as I had first thought. This is done with an environment variable as per the documentation, but how best to do this within our Azure DevOps build systems? The easiest way to set the environment variable `SONAR_SCANNER_OPTS` on every build agent is to just set it via a Azure Pipeline variable. This works because the build agent makes all pipeline variables available as environment variables at runtime. ...

Introduction The use of variables is important in Azure DevOps pipelines, especially when using YML templates. They allow a single pipeline to be used for multiple branches/configurations etc. The most common form of variables you see is are the predefined built in variables e.g. $(Build.BuildNumber) and your own custom ones e.g. $(var). Usually the value of these variables are set before/as the build is run, as an input condition. But this is not the only way variables can be used. As noted in the documentation there are different ways to access a variable… ...

This is another one of those posts so I can remember where some useful information is…. If you are migrating your Azure DevOps Classic Builds and Release to Multi-Stage YAML then an import step is to export all the exiting build, task groups and release as YAML files. You can do this by hand within the Pipeline UI, with a lot of cut and pasting, but much easier is to use the excellent Yamlizr - Azure DevOps Classic-to-YAML Pipelines CLI from Alex Vincent. A single CLI command exports everything with a Team project into a neat folder structure of template base YAML. ...

I have had a ThinkPad Active Pen (model SD60G957200) ever since I got my Lenovo X1 Carbon Extreme. The pen, when it works, has worked well. However, the problem has been that whether the pen and PC detected each other seemed very hit and miss. Today I found the root cause. It was not drivers or dodgy Bluetooth as I had thought, but a weak spring inside the pen. It was not so weak that the battery rattled, but weak enough that the electrical circuit was not being closed reliably on the battery. ...

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hU8gSpuPS-4

The Black Live Matter movement has engendered many conversations, hopefully starting changes for the good. Often these changes involve the use of language. One such change has been the move to stop using the name master and switching to the name main for the trunk/default branch in Git repos. This change is moving apace driven by tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps . I have recently had need, for the first time since swapping my default branch name in new repos to main, to use Semantic Version and the GitVersion tool. ...

Azure DevOps YAML base pipelines allow the pipeline definitions to be treated like any other code. So you make changes in a branch and PR them into the main/trunk when they are approved. This works well if all the YAML files are in the same repo, but not so well if you are using YAML templates and the templated YAML is stored in a different repo. This is because an Azure DevOps PR is limited to a single repo. So testing a change to a YAML template in a different repo needs a bit of thought. ...