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Background Having automated builds is essential to any good development process. Irrespective of the build engine in use, VSTS, Jenkins etc. you need to have a means to create the VMs that are running the builds. You can of course do this by hand, but in many ways you are just extending the old ‘it works on my PC – the developer can build it only on their own PC’ problem i.e. it is hard to be sure what version of tools are in use. This is made worse by the fact it is too tempting for someone to remote onto the build VM to update some SDK or tool without anyone else’s knowledge. ...

I am really pleased that we at Black Marble are again the first UK location announcing that we are hosting an event on June 16th as part of the 2018 Global DevOps BootCamp. As the event’s site says… “The Global DevOps Bootcamp takes place once a year on venues all over the world. The more people joining in, the better it gets! The Global DevOps Bootcamp is a free one-day event hosted by local passionate DevOps communities around the globe and centrally organized by Xpirit & Solidify and sponsored by Microsoft. This event is all about DevOps on the Microsoft Stack. It shows the latest DevOps trends and insights in modern technologies. It is an amazing combination between getting your hands dirty and sharing experience and knowledge in VSTS, Azure, DevOps with other community members.” ...

I recently released an updated version of my Generate Parameters.XML tool for Visual Studio. This release adds support for generating parameters.xml files from app.config files as well as web.config files Why you might ask why add support for app.config files when the parameters.xml model is only part of WebDeploy? Well, at Black Marble we like the model of updating a single file using a tokenised set of parameters from within our DevOps CI/CD pipelines. It makes it easy to take release variables and write them, at deploy time, into a parameters.xml file to be injected into a machine’s configuration. We wanted to extend this to configuring services and the like where for example a DLL based service is configured with a mycode.dll.config file The injection process of the parameters.xml into a web.config file is automatically done as part of the WebDeploy process (or a VSTS extension wrapping WebDeploy), but if you want to use a similar model for app.config files then you need some PowerShell. For example, if we have the app.config ...

I wrote a post recently Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline. I realised since writing it that it does not address the issue of if you wish to version your ARM Templates using Semantic Versioning. My JSON versioning task I used did not support the option of not extracting a numeric version number e.g. 1.2.3.4 from a VSTS build number. To address this limitation I have modified my Version JSON file task to address. This change to my task allows it to be used with the GitVersion VSTS task to manage the semantic versioning. For more details on GitVersion see the project documentation. Hence, I my now able to generate a version number using GitVersion and pass this in to the versioning task directly using a build variable. ...

At Black Marble we have been migrating our DevTest labs to from on-premises TFS Lab Management to a mixture of on-premise and Azure hosted Lability defined Labs as discussed by Rik Hepworth on his blog. I have only been tangentially involved in this effort until recently, consuming the labs but not creating the definitions. So this post is one of those I do where I don’t want to forget things I learnt the hard way, or to put it another way asking Rik or Chris after watching a 2 hour environment deploy fail for the Xth time. ...

Updated 3 Feb 2018 - Also see Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline with Semantic Versioning Azure Resource Templates (ARM) allow your DevOps infrastructure deployments to be treated as ‘content as code’. So infrastructure definitions can be stored in source control. As with any code it is really useful to know which version you have out in production. Now a CI/CD process and its usage logs can help here, but just having a version string stored somewhere accessible on the production systems is always useful. In an ARM Template this can be achieved using the ‘content version’ field in the template (see documentation for more detail on this file). The question becomes how best to update this field with a version number? The solution I used was a VSTS JSON Versioning Task I had already created to update the template’s .JSON definition file. I popped this task at the start of my ARM templates CI build process and it set the value prior to the storage of the template as a build artifact used within the CD pipeline ...

As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful running of a given build. So if the last release of the task extension was successful then the next set of tests have no associations to go in the release notes, not exactly exercising all the code paths! In the past I added this test data by hand, a new manual commit to the repo prior to a release; but why have a dog and bark yourself? Better to automate the process. This can done using a PowerShell file, run inline or stored in the builds source repo and run within a VSTS build. The code is shown below, you can pass in the required parameters, but I set sensible default for my purposes ...

Whist adding a couple of new tasks to my VSTS Manifest Versioning Extension I hit the problem that VSIX package became too big to upload to the Marketplace. The error I saw in my CI/CD VSTS pipeline was``` ##vso[task.logissue type=error;]error: Failed Request: Bad Request(400) - The extension package size ‘23255292 bytes’ exceeds the maximum package size ‘20971520 bytes’ 1. They get a list of files 2. Extract a version number from the build number 3. Then apply this to one or more files in a product/task specific manner there has been some cut and paste coding. This means that I have NPM modules in the tasks **package.json** file that were not needed for a given task. I could manually address this but there is an NPM module to help, DepCheck. First install the [DepCheck](https://www.npmjs.com/package/depcheck) module``` npm install depcheck –g ```then run **depcheck** from the command line whist within your task’s folder. This returns a list of modules listed in the **package.json** that are not referenced in the code files. These can then be removed from the **package.json.** e.g. I saw``` Unused dependencies \* @types/node \* @types/q \* Buffer \* fs \* request \* tsd Unused devDependencies \* @types/chai \* @types/mocha \* @types/node \* mocha-junit-reporter \* ts-loader \* ts-node \* typings ```The important ones to focus on are the first block (non-development references), as these are the ones that are packaged with the production code in the VSIX; I was already pruning the **node\_module** folder of development dependencies prior to creating the VSIX to remove devDependancies using the command``` npm prune –production ```I did find some of the listed modules strange, as I knew they really were needed and a quick test of removing them did show the code failed if they were missing. These are what [depchecks documentation calls false alerts](https://www.npmjs.com/package/depcheck). I found I could remove the **@type/xxx** and **tsd** references, which were the big ones, that are only needed in development when working in TypeScript. Once these were removed for all four of my NodeJS based tasks my VSIX dropped in size from 22Mb to 7Mb. So problem solved.

In response to requests on the VSTS Marketplace I have added a pair of tasks to added/edit entries in a .JSON format files. The first is for adding a version to a file like a package.json file e.g. { "name": "myapp", "version": "1.0.0", "license": "MIT" } The second is designed for angular environment.ts file e.g. export const environment = { production: true, version: '1.0.0.0' }; But I bet people find other uses, they always do. ...

Background I have recently been posting on using Azure to host private VSTS build/release agents to avoid agent queue deadlocking issues with more complex release pipelines. One of the areas discussed is reducing cost of running a private agent in Azure by only running the private agent within a limited time range, when you guess it might be needed. I have done this using DevTest Labs Auto Start and Auto Stop features. This works, but is it not better to only start the agent VM when it is actually really needed, not when you guess it might be? I need this private agent only when working on my VSTS extensions, not something I do everyday. Why waste CPU cycles that are never used? ...