Posts

I am really pleased to say that we at Black Marble are again hosting a venue for this year’s edition of the Global DevOps Bootcamp on Saturday May 30th 2020. For those who have not been to a previous GDBC event at Black Marble, or any of the other 70+ venues across the work, what can you expect on the day? A video keynote from an Industry Leader in the DevOps field A local keynote developing the topics of the bootcamp The remainder of the day is made up of team based hands on exercises. Lat years content can be seen here, this years will be all new. ...

Visual Studio Online is back. Unlike the previous usage of this name, which was an incarnation of what is now Azure DevOps Services, this is actually an editor for code. Just like you might expect it to be! The new VSO, which is currently in preview, is a service running in Azure that allows you to in effect run Visual Studio Code on a Linux VM. Once you have signed into VSO with an MSA and it has created the required Resource Group and VSO Plan in your Azure subscription, you create one or more ‘environments’ that defines the size of the VM to use and which GitHub hosted repo the environment will edit. ...

Background I’ve written a good few extensions for Azure DevOps Services. Most of the early ones I wrote were written in PowerShell, but of late I have tended to use Typescript (targeting Node.JS) for the added cross-platform support. This has led me to consider if it was worth the effort to convert all my legacy extensions to support cross-platform usage? This is of course assuming the tasks the extension contains are useful on a non-Window platform. There is no point porting a Windows only tool away from PowerShell. ...

Introduction There are times when you need to run Private Azure DevOps agents as opposed to using one of the hosted ones provided by Microsoft. This could be for a variety of reasons, including needing to access resources inside your corporate network or needing to have a special hardware specification or set of software installed on the agent. If using such private agents, you really need to have an easy way to provision them. This is so that all your agents are standardised and easily re-creatable. Firstly you don’t want build agents with software on them you can’t remember installing or patching. This is just another form of the “works on one developer’s machine but not another” problem. Also if you have the means to replace the agents very regularly and reliably you can avoid the need to patch them; you can just replace them with newer VMs created off latest patched base Operating System images and software releases. ...

Issue I have been busy automating the provision of our private Azure DevOps Agents using Packer and Lability; a more details blog post is on the way. All has been going OK on my test rig, but when came to run the automation pipeline on our main build HyperV host I got an error > Get-VmcConfigurationData : Datafile EnvironmentsBuildAgent-VS2017BuildAgent-VS2017.psd1 NOT FOUND. Exiting But the file was there! I check the default Lability paths, but all these looked OK, and none pointed to my environment location on C: anyway ...

Over the past few days I have published two major enhancements to my Azure DevOps Cross Platform Release Notes Extension. Added Support for Builds Prior to version 2.17.x this extension could only be used in Releases. This was because it used Release specific calls provided in the Microsoft API to work out the work items and changesets/commits associated with the Release. This is unlike my older PowerShell based Release Notes Extension which was initially developed for Builds and only later enhanced to work in Releases, but achieved this using my own logic to iterate across Builds associated with Releases to work out the associations. With the advent of YAML multistage Pipelines the difference between a Build and a Release is blurring, so I thought it high time to add Build support to my Cross Platform Release Notes Extension. Which it now does. ...

I have recently been doing a TFS 2015 to Azure DevOps Server 2019.1 upgrade for a client. The first for a while, I have been working with Azure DevOps Service mostly of late. Anyway I saw an issue I had never seen before with any version of TFS, and I could find no information on the Internet. The Problem The error occurred when I tried to queue a new build after the upgrade, the build instantly failed with the error ...

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. ...

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. However, GitHub Action’s YAML syntax is different and Actions are not Tasks.You can’t just re-use your old Azure DevOps tasks. ...

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. ...