Tech Tips

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....

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....

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....

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....