Tech Tips

This is another of those posts to remind me in the future. I searched the documentation for this answer for ages and found nothing, eventually getting the solution by asking on the SonarQube Forum When you link SonarQube into an Azure DevOps pipeline that is used from branch protection the success, or failure, of the PR branch analysis is shown as an optional PR Check The question was ‘how to do I make it a required check?’. Turns out the answer is to add an extra Azure DevOps branch policey status check for the ‘SonarQube/quality gate’ ...

Background We regularly re-build our Azure DevOps private agents using Packer and Lability, as I have posted about before. Since the latest re-build, we have seen all sorts of problems. All related to pulling packages and tools from NuGet based repositories. Problems we have never seen with any previous generation of our agents. The Issue The issue turned out to be related to registering a private PowerShell repository. $RegisterSplat = @{ Name = 'PrivateRepo' SourceLocation = 'https://psgallery.mydomain.co.uk/nuget/PowerShell' PublishLocation = 'https://psgallery.mydomain.co.uk/nuget/PowerShell' InstallationPolicy = 'Trusted' } Register-PSRepository @RegisterSplat Running this command caused the default dotnet NuGet repository to be unregistered i.e. the command dotnet nuget list source was expected to return ...

Creating a new project in Azure DevOps with your desired process template is straightforward. However, it is only the start of the job for most administrators. They will commonly want to set up other configuration settings such as branch protection rules, default pipelines etc. before giving the team access to the project. All this administration can be very time consuming and of course prone to human error. To make this process easier, quicker and more consistent I have developed a process to automated all of this work. It uses a mixture of the following: ...

I recently had the need to get the email address of the approver of a deployment to an environment from within a multi-stage YAML pipeline. Turns out it was not as easy as I might have hoped given the available documented APIs. Background My YAML pipeline included a manual approval to allow deployment to a given environment. Within the stage protected by the approval, I needed the approver’s details, specifically their email address. ...

I have spent too long today trying to track down an intermittent “SQLite Error 5: ‘database is locked’” error in .Net Core Entity Framework. I have read plenty of documentation and even tried swapping to use SQL Server, as opposed to SQLite, but this just resulted in the error ‘There is already an open DataReader associated with this Connection which must be closed first.’. So everything pointed to it being a mistake I had made. ...

There are good reasons why you might wish to move an existing Azure DevOps organisation from one region to another. The most common ones are probably: A new Azure DevOps region has become available since you created your organisation that is a ‘better home’ for your projects. New or changing national regulations require your source stored in a specific location. You want your repositories as close to your workers as possible, to reduce network latency. One of these reasons meant I recently had to move an Azure DevOps organisation, so followed the documented process. This requires you to ...

I was reminded recently of the hoops you have to jump through to run UWP unit tests within an Azure DevOps automated build. The key steps you need to remember are as follows Desktop Interaction The build agent should not be running as a service it must be able to interact with the desktop. If you did not set this mode during configuration this post from Donovan Brown shows how to swap the agent over without a complete reconfiguration. ...

Whilst adding SonarQube analysis to a large project I started getting memory errors during the analysis phase. The solution was to up the memory available to the SonarQube Scanner on the my build agent, not the memory on the SonarQube server as I had first thought. This is done with an environment variable as per the documentation, but how best to do this within our Azure DevOps build systems? The easiest way to set the environment variable `SONAR_SCANNER_OPTS` on every build agent is to just set it via a Azure Pipeline variable. This works because the build agent makes all pipeline variables available as environment variables at runtime. ...

Introduction The use of variables is important in Azure DevOps pipelines, especially when using YML templates. They allow a single pipeline to be used for multiple branches/configurations etc. The most common form of variables you see is are the predefined built in variables e.g. $(Build.BuildNumber) and your own custom ones e.g. $(var). Usually the value of these variables are set before/as the build is run, as an input condition. But this is not the only way variables can be used. As noted in the documentation there are different ways to access a variable… ...

This is another one of those posts so I can remember where some useful information is…. If you are migrating your Azure DevOps Classic Builds and Release to Multi-Stage YAML then an import step is to export all the exiting build, task groups and release as YAML files. You can do this by hand within the Pipeline UI, with a lot of cut and pasting, but much easier is to use the excellent Yamlizr - Azure DevOps Classic-to-YAML Pipelines CLI from Alex Vincent. A single CLI command exports everything with a Team project into a neat folder structure of template base YAML. ...