Posts

A History Lesson Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) has been around since 2005, since the first release of Team Foundation Server (TFS) in 2005. In 2013, over 10 years ago, Microsoft added Git support to TFS (later renamed as Azure DevOps), Git had already been around for 8 years at that point. 10 years is a long time in the software industry, I always think of ‘IT years’ like ‘dog years’ i.e. 7 to 1, so over 70 years has passed, a lifetime. Over this period Git has become the de facto standard for source control. So if you are still using TFVC as your source control system you really need to ask yourself why? ...

It is a major effort, often unfortunately ignored, keeping the dependencies in an open source project up to date. This was highlighted in Jesse Houwing’s post on the state of the Azure DevOps Marketplace. Since reading this I have made much more of an effort to keep my Azure DevOps Extensions up to date. Dependabot generated PRs have been a great help in this regard. Creating PRs for vulnerabilities and out of date dependencies. ...

The Issue We saw an issue with our SonarQube 10.3 Developer Edition (that is running as a Docker image hosted in Azure) when it was doing the analysis of a project that included Azure Bicep files. The Azure DevOps pipeline that triggered the SonarQube analysis was not failing, but within the SonarQube analysis step an error was reported in the task log INFO: Sensor IaC AzureResourceManager Sensor is restricted to changed files only INFO: 1 source file to be analyzed ##[error]ERROR: Cannot parse 'AzureServices/QueryPack.bicep:89:1' The Solution Turns out the problem was related to parsing Bicep files for App Insights Query packs. ...

Background I have an Azure Static Website that is built from a GitHub hosted repo using the default Action Workflow automation created by Azure when setting up the static site. A really nice feature of this configuration is that when a PR is created in GitHub a test static website environment site is built in Azure to review the changes. When the PR is closed the test environment site is deleted. ...

The Issue This site was built using Hugo, a static site generator. I recently tried to do a long overdue update the version of Hugo from 0.108 to the current 0.122 version. I had not expected any problems, but found that the site failed to render, but with no error message all I saw was hugo.exe server --logLevel info Start building sites … hugo v0.122.0-b9a03bd59d5f71a529acb3e33f995e0ef332b3aa+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2024-01-26T15:54:24Z VendorInfo=gohugoio INFO copy static: syncing static files to \ INFO build: running step "process" duration "97.3263ms" INFO build: running step "assemble" duration "335.1476ms" I normally would have expected to see a INFO build: running step "render" line or an error, but got nothing, irrespective of the log level I set. ...

I was recently trying to create an Azure DevOps work item when an email is received using the Power Automate ‘Create an Azure DevOps work item when email arrives with ‘Bug’ in subject’ template. The flow created without issue, and all the drop downs were correctly populated with O365 and Azure DevOps values as expected. However, when the flow ran, on receiving an email to the correct inbox, it failed with a BadGateway error. ...

Issue Many development tools rely on the fact that git.exe is installed to perform source control operations e.g. VSCode. However, a common problem I have seen is that security settings on many corporate Windows devices do not allow the installation of git CLI using an MSI file by the user. VSCode is an approved application, or installed as a user application as opposed to a system one, so is available but limited by it’s lack of source control features. ...

Background I have recently hit a problem whilst developing some training material on Single Sign on (SSO) in GitHub Enterprise. This training is to be delivered in a training instance of GHE that is configured to use a training instance of Azure Entra ID as the SAML identity provider. To make my life easier, so I am not logging in and out of my work and test Azure Entra ID directories, I have been using profiles in my Chromium based Edge browser. This means I have two copies of Edge running, one for my ‘real’ work directory and the other for the training directory. ...

Background On some projects we use Jeremy Long’s DependencyCheck tool, via the Azure DevOps task, to scan our code for known vulnerabilities. This tool uses the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to get its data. This data is downloaded on demand from the NVD site but the DependencyCheck tool. Since the recent API changes on the NVD site, as supported by DependencyCheck 9.0.x, the downloading of the current vulnerability data has slowed from about 3 minutes to around 15 minutes, even with a valid NVD API Key. So effectively slowing all our pipeline builds by 15 minutes, a very significant change if the rest of the build only takes a few seconds! ...

The Problem I have been using Packer to generate our Azure DevOps Build agent VHD images for a while now, but when I came to regenerate them this time I hit a problem. As I have documented previously, our process is that we update our fork of the Microsoft repository and then merge the newest changes into our long lived branch that contains our customisations. I then use Packer to generate a new generalised VHD which has all the same features as the Microsoft hosted agents. I then use this VHD to create our new Hyper-V based self hosted Azure DevOps agent VMs using Lability. ...