Posts

There is a general move in Azure DevOps Pipelines to using YAML, as opposed to the designer, to define your pipelines. This is particularly enforced when using them via the new GitHub Marketplace Azure Pipelines method where YAML appears to be the only option. This has shown up a hole in my Pipeline Tasks documentation, I had nothing on YAML! So I have added a YAML usage page for each set of tasks in each of my extensions e.g the file utilities tasks. ...

Azure DevOps has had some serious issue over the past couple of weeks with availability here in Europe. A really good open and detailed root cause analysis has just been posted by the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. It also covers the mitigations they are putting place to make sure this same issues do not occur again. We all have to remember that the cloud is not magic. Cloud service providers will have problems like any on-premise services; but trying to hide them does nothing to build confidence. So I for one applaud posts like this. I just wish all cloud service providers were as open when problem occur. ...

When I started creating OSS extensions for Azure DevOps Pipelines (starting on TFSPreview, then VSO, then VSTS and now named Azure DevOps) I made the mistake of putting all my extensions in a single GitHub repo. I thought this would make life easier, I was wrong, it should have been a repo per extension. I have considered splitting the GitHub repo, but as a number of people have forked it, over 100 at the last count, I did not want to start a chain of chaos for loads of people. ...

Registration for the new season of Black Marble events have just been opened. If you can make it to Yorkshire why not come to an event (or two) Azure DevOps: So VSTS has Changed - 24 Oct 2018 Next Generation Business Productivity with Office 365 and Teams - 25 Oct 2018 Moving your Development Process to the Cloud with Azure DevOps - 14 Nov 2018 Modernising Enterprise Information Architecture - 21 Nov 2018 Next Generation Business Productivity with Office 365 and Teams - 05 Dec 2018 Architecture Forum in the North – 11 - 12 Dec 2018 Moving your Development Process to the Cloud with Azure DevOps -16 Jan 2019 If you are stuck in the grim south, why not look out for us at Future Decoded in London at the end of the month ...

Whilst I was off work last week TFS 2018 Update 3 was released. As stated in the 2018.3 release notes this is the final bug fix update release of TFS 2018. The next major release of TFS will not be named TFS 2019 as you might have expected, but will use the new name of Azure DevOps Server. You can see the features planned for this next release in the Azure DevOps Features Timeline ...

The Azure DevOps (VSTS) team have published the promised postmortem on the outage on the 4th of September. It gives good detail on what actually happened to the South Central Azure Datacenter and how it effected VSTS (as it was then called). More interestingly it provides a discussion of mitigations they plan to put in place to stop a single datacentre failure having such a serious effect in the future. Great openness as always from the team ...

Today Microsoft made a big announcement, VSTS is now Azure DevOps. The big change is they have split VSTS into 5 services you can use together or independently, including Azure Pipelines for CI/CD - free for open source and available in the GitHub CI marketplace. An important thing to note is that IT IS NOT JUST FOR AZURE. Don’t be afraid of the name. There a wide range of connectors to other cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud, as will as many other DevOps tools Learn more at have a look at the official post ...

The Problem The documentation for the VSTS WIKI suggests you can embed a video in a VSTS WIKI using the markdown/HTML``` Problem is that this does not seem to work, the MP4 just does not appear, you get an empty video player. However, if you swap to a full URL it does work e.g. ### The Workaround The workaround is to either place the MP4 file in some URL accessible location e.g. some Azure web space (not really addressing the problem), or more usefully use the [VSTS API to get the file](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/vsts/git/items/get?view=vsts-rest-4.1) out the repo that backs the WIKI. The format of the HTML tag becomes``` <video src="https://vstsinstance.visualstudio.com/MyTeamProject/\_apis/git/repositories/MyTeamProject.wiki/Items?path=\_media%2Fvstswiki\_high.mp4 width=400" controls> </video> ```This will get the current version of the file on default branch, you can add extra parameters to to specify versions and branches if required as per the [API documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/vsts/git/?view=vsts-rest-4.1). So not a perfect solution as you have to think about branches and versions, they are not handled automatically, but at least it does work

When you want to register a build agent with VSTS, you use the VSTS instance’s URL and a user’s Personal Access Token (PAT). Whilst doing this today I connected to the VSTS instance OK but got the error “Agent pool not found”.when I was asked to pick the agent pool to add the new agent to. As the user who’s PAT I was using was a Build Administrator I was a bit confused, but then I remembered to check their user access level. It was set to Stakeholder, once this was changed to Basic I was able to register the agent without use. ...

You have always been able to customise your Team Projects in TFS, by editing a host of XML files, but it was not a pleasant experience. In VSTS a far more pleasant to use web based inherited customisation model was added, much to, I think, most administrators relief. If you used the TFS DB migration service you ended up with a VSTS instance full of the the XML style team projects, and you were stuck there, with no way to change these to the new inherited mode, that is until now as Microsoft have released to preview a conversion tool. ...