Tech Tips

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. ...

I have had a ThinkPad Active Pen (model SD60G957200) ever since I got my Lenovo X1 Carbon Extreme. The pen, when it works, has worked well. However, the problem has been that whether the pen and PC detected each other seemed very hit and miss. Today I found the root cause. It was not drivers or dodgy Bluetooth as I had thought, but a weak spring inside the pen. It was not so weak that the battery rattled, but weak enough that the electrical circuit was not being closed reliably on the battery. ...

The Black Live Matter movement has engendered many conversations, hopefully starting changes for the good. Often these changes involve the use of language. One such change has been the move to stop using the name master and switching to the name main for the trunk/default branch in Git repos. This change is moving apace driven by tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps . I have recently had need, for the first time since swapping my default branch name in new repos to main, to use Semantic Version and the GitVersion tool. ...

Azure DevOps YAML base pipelines allow the pipeline definitions to be treated like any other code. So you make changes in a branch and PR them into the main/trunk when they are approved. This works well if all the YAML files are in the same repo, but not so well if you are using YAML templates and the templated YAML is stored in a different repo. This is because an Azure DevOps PR is limited to a single repo. So testing a change to a YAML template in a different repo needs a bit of thought. ...

A question I am often asked when consulting on Azure DevOps is ‘how can I automatically create release notes and how can I publish them?’. Well it is for just this requirement that I have written a set of Azure DevOps Pipeline Tasks Release Note Generator - to generate release notes. I strongly recommend this Cross-platform Node-based version. I plan to deprecate my older PowerShell version in the not too distant future as it uses ‘homegrown logic’, as opposed to standard Azure DevOps API calls, to get associated items. Wiki Updater - to upload a page tot a WIKI. WIKI PDF Generator - to convert a generated page, or whole WIKI, to PDF format. So lets deal with these tools in turn ...

The Issue I have an Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipeline that started giving the error `The pipeline is not valid error: Unable to resolve latest version for pipeline templates: this could be due to inaccessible pipeline or no version is available` and failing instantly. The Solution This is not the most helpful message, but after some digging I found the problem. The pipeline used another pipeline as a resources ...

A common question I get when people are using my Release Notes task for Azure DevOps is whether it is possible to get the release notes as a PDF. In the past, the answer was that I did not know of any easy way. However, I have recently come across a command line tool by Max Melcher called AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport that allows you to export a whole WIKI (or a single file) as a PDF. Its basic usage is ...

Disks filling up on our private Azure DevOps agents is a constant battle. We have maintenance jobs setup on the agent pools, to clean out old build working folders nightly, but these don’t run often enough. We need a clean out more than once a day due to the number and size of our builds. To address this, with UI based builds, we successfully used the Post Build Cleanup Extension. However since we have moved many of our builds to YAML we found it not working so well. Turned out the problem was due to the way got source code. The Post Build Cleanup task is intelligent, it does not just delete folders on demand. It check to see what the Get Source ‘Clean’ setting was when the repo was cloned and bases what it deletes on this value e.g. nothing, source, or everything. This behaviour is not that obvious. In a UI based builds it is easy to check this setting. You are always in the UI when editing the build. However, in YAML it is easy to forget the setting, as it is one of those few values that cannot be set in YAML. To make the post build cleanup task actually delete folders in a YAML pipeline you need to ...

During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift‘ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work. Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively Zwift’ing, but it’s other functions were OK. After much fiddling I found the issue was the network connection from my PC up to Zwift and nothing to do with the phone app. But in case it is of any use to others here are the steps I took to ...