Tech Tips

Introduction Over the years, I have been involved in numerous migrations of TFS/Azure DevOps Server from on-premises servers to the cloud hosted Azure DevOps Services using the Microsoft Azure DevOps Data Migration Tool. As long as you carefully followed the instructions, the process was relatively straightforward. I was recently involved in a cloud migration of a set of non-English Azure DevOps Servers i.e. the Azure DevOps Servers had been installed in French not English. Migrating these servers to Azure DevOps Services proved a challenge. ...

Introduction I got asked today by a client if there was a way to automate the exporting Azure DevOps Test Plans to Excel files. They knew they could do it manually via the Azure DevOps UI, but had a lot of Test Plans to export and wanted to automate the process. The Options I considered a few options: TCM CLI - This is a command line tool that can be used to interact with Azure DevOps Test Plans. It can be used to import or clone Test Plans, but not to export them. AZ DEVOPS CLI - This is a command line tool that can be used to interact with Azure DevOps. Unfortunately, it does not have any commands to export Test Plans. Azure DevOps REST API - This is a powerful API that can be used to interact with Azure DevOps, but the documentation makes no mention of a call to export Test Plans. But….. ...

Introduction I have recently been swapping some Azure DevOps Pipelines to GitHub Actions as part of a large GitHub Enterprise migration. The primary tool I have been using for this is GitHub Copilot in the new Agent Mode Frankly, Copilot is like magic, it is amazing how close it gets to a valid solution. I say this after suffering years of undelivered marketing promises of no-code “we won’t need developers in the future”. ...

I have been doing some work one a Logic Apps that routes its traffic out via a vNet and accesses its underlying Storage Account via private endpoints. ‘Nothing that special in that configuration’ I hear you saying, but I did manage to confuse myself whilst testing. After changing my configuration of the vNet, I restarted the Logic App to make sure everything was working as expected on startup. The Logic App appeared to start within a few seconds, the Overview pane in the Azure Portal showing the correct values. ...

The Problem I recently was debugging an Execute PowerShell Code Logic App action, so wanted to see it’s output. However, when I reviewed the run history, the output for my code action was empty. The Cause (and Solution) The problem turned out to be that the Logic App’s Inbound traffic configuration. You can replicate this issue easily Create a new Logic App Workflow, use any trigger and then add an Execute PowerShell Code action, you don’t need to edit the default code sample. Save the new Action and then run it. Review the run history and you’ll see that the output as expected. Next, change the Logic App’s ‘Inbound traffic configuration > Public Network Access’ to ‘Disabled’ and run the Logic App again, and the output now cannot be seen, as shown above. You are actually warned about this in the Azure Portal the first time you view a run history the settings that block it ...

The Problem I recently had the need in an Azure Logic App to read a CSV file from an Azure Storage account, parse the file, and then process the data row by row. Unfortunately, there is no built-in action in Logic Apps to parse CSV files. So as to avoid having to write an Azure function, or use a number of slow, low level Logic App actions, I decided to use the PowershellCode action to parse the CSV file quickly inline with the rest of the Logic App. ...

Since moving house a couple of years ago, I have gained an ever increasing set of apps on my phone to manage various things, such the Solaredge PV and battery system we installed and our Octopus Energy account, to name but two. In the past, I had avoided IOT and the ‘Intelligent Home’ as I did not want to get to the point where ‘I can’t do the washing up, the Internet is down’. However, I recently got sent an Octopus Mini which meant for the first time I could get real time information from their API, so no longer needing to wait until my Smart Meter got around to transferring data to them, which could be up to 48 hours later. ...

Edited: 4th Feb 2025 to add detail on Azure DevOps Pipelines Service Connection Introduction When automating administration tasks via scripts in Azure DevOps in the past I would have commonly used the Azure DevOps REST API. However, today I tend to favour the Azure DevOps CLI. The reason for this is that the CLI wrappers the REST API in such a way that it is easier to use and more consistent. ...

The Issue The Azure DevOps CLI command az boards work-item update can take a list of fields as a set if value pairs e.g. az boards work-item update --id 123 --fields Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort=10 However, if you try to replace the field name with a variable in PowerShell like this $fieldname = "Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort" az boards work-item update --id 123 --fields $fieldname=10 you will get an error like this The –fields argument should consist of space separated “field=value” pairs. The Solution The solution is simple, and the same one required if you wish to pass multiple fields into the command, you need to wrapper the set of key value pairs for the fields in quotes e.g. ...

Background I recently wrote about the changes I had had to make to our Azure DevOps pipelines to address the changes required when code signing with a new DigiCert certificate due to new private key storage requirements for Code Signing certificates Today I had to do the same for a GitHub Actions pipeline. The process is very similar, but there are a few differences in the syntax and the way the secrets are stored. ...