Tech Tips

I have blogged in the past about Caching NVD Vulnerability Dependency data on hosted Azure DevOps Pipeline agents. Using the cache is a great way to speed up slow builds. However, today I was surprised to find I was getting cache misses on my pipeline, even though I was sure the cache should have been hit. There are rules over how the cache is used: The cache is specific to a pipeline definition, so there is no sharing of the cache between pipeline definitions The cache is only created if the pipeline is successful (running the post run tasks) The cache only lasts 7 days but what I had not realised was the cache is also specific to the branch in a not so obvious way....

Background Programmatic connection to Azure DevOps cannot be done with your Active Directory credentials. This is because this involves a dialog being shown, and these days usually an MFA check too. Historically, the solution to this problem was to enable Alternate Credentials, which could be passed as username and password, without the dialog being shown. However, the use of these has been deprecated since 2020, and they have been completely removed since Jan 2024....

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 Creating PRs for vulnerabilities and out of date dependencies....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....

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....