Posts

I posted a while ago about how I had automated the generation of social media posts for my static Hugo based website using Azure Logic Apps. The other place I auto-generate social media posts is from releases via my project’s Azure DevOps Pipeline builds. These use a YAML Pipeline Template that calls a Marketplace task to post to Twitter and a PowerShell task to Invoke-WebRequest to post to Mastodon. Recently the Twitter task started to fail, and given the recent changes to the Twitter API with the move to the V2 API, I decided a new solution was required. ...

Background When working with Azure DevOps, you may need to access the REST API if you wish to perform scripted tasks such as creating work items, or generating reports. Historically, you had to use a Personal Access Token (PAT) to do this. If you look in my repo of useful Azure DevOps PowerShell scripts you will find all the scripts make use of a function that creates an authenticated WebClient object using a passed in PAT token. ...

Background We use Lability to build Windows Server images for our test labs. Lability makes use of Desired State Configuration (DSC) to build the VM images. Part of this process is for Lability to download DSC modules, as ZIP files, from a NuGet feed such as PowerShell Gallery to inject into the created VM image. Historically, we have stored our own private DSC modules on an internally hosted NuGet server. However, we wanted to move these modules to a private Azure DevOps Artifacts feed. The problem was that Lability does not support downloading of DSC modules from Azure DevOps Artifact feeds, whether they are public or private, because of the way the package URLs are constructed. ...

I make every effort keep all my Azure DevOps Pipeline extensions reliable as I know they are used by many people, but mistakes happen. Yesterday I released an updated version of my ReleaseNotes task that introduced a bug if the pipeline produced no artifacts. I am pleased to say I have fixed the bug, and addressed this gap in my test coverage. However, this did mean for about 12 hours if you are using this task in a pipeline that did not produce artifacts, maybe one that just deployed consumed artifacts from other pipelines, you had a failing pipeline. ...

Background At Black Marble we have our own private build agents, but they are built using the same Packer process as the Microsoft hosted ones. I recently rebuilt our agents to match the latest version of the hosted agents, and I ran into an issue with some .NET 3.1 based x86 MSTests. The tests were failing with the following error: A total of 34 test files matched the specified pattern. ##[error]Testhost process exited with error: A fatal error occurred. The required library hostfxr.dll could not be found. ##[error]If this is a self-contained application, that library should exist in [E:\Agent\_work\1\s\src\Ux.Common.UnitTests\bin\x86\Release\netcoreapp3.1\]. ##[error]If this is a framework-dependent application, install the runtime in the global location [C:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet] or use the DOTNET_ROOT(x86) environment variable to specify the runtime location or register the runtime location in [HKLM\SOFTWARE\dotnet\Setup\InstalledVersions\x86\InstallLocation]. When I checked the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet it was not there, .NET 3.1 x86 was no longer present on the agent. ...

Background I was recently trying to use PowerShelGet Install-Package to install a module from an Azure DevOps Artifacts hosted PowerShell Gallery using the following script # For authentication use a PAT as the password, UID can be anything $PATcreds = Get-Credential Register-PSRepository -Name BM -SourceLocation 'https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/<org>/_packaging/PowerShell/nuget/v2' -PublishLocation 'https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/<org>/_packaging/PowerShell/nuget/v2' -InstallationPolicy Trusted Install-Package BlackMarble.Package -Source BM -Credential $PATcreds The script did not work I was getting the error Install-Package : Cannot find the path ‘C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\936930114\BlackMarble.Package\BlackMarble.Package.0.3.79\BlackMarble.Package.psd1’ because it does not exist. You could see a download progress bar that suggested the download had occurred, but no module was installed. ...

Background It is a really useful feature that you can expose Key Vault stored secrets as Azure DevOps pipeline variables via a variable group, but what happens when you do this? And what can you do if you try to expose too many variables? I was recently working on a system where there was an increasing number of Key Vault secrets that were being exposed as variables via a variable group. This was working fine, until I started getting warnings in the following form on Windows based Azure DevOps agents: ...

Background I am using an Azure Function as backend for processing forms submissions from a Hugo static website, to process a simple contact form. I wanted to add reCAPTCHA support, as the site was generating too many spam emails. I also wanted to show a different confirmation pages depending on whether the reCAPTCHA check passed or failed There a good few posts about using an Azure Function as backend for a static web site form. But what I could not find was how to handle the return value from the Azure Function. ...

Problem After deploying a dotnet 6 console app to a production server, I got the following error: Exception: [Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data.Odbc, Version=6.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The system cannot find the file specified.] The strange thing was the same EXE, built on a Microsoft hosted Azure DevOps build agent, was working on the test server and was deployed using the same Azure DevOps Pipeline to both systems. ...

Late last year at (DDDNorth](https://twitter.com/dddnorth) my session had the title ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?’. Between anecdotes, a key theme was tha people too often don’t make sensible diagnostic steps. A problem caused, in my opinion, by the fact they have not been exposed to the fundamentals of how a computer works, due to the way computing is taught today, as opposed to how it was taught in my youth in the 80s ...