Tech Tips

In the past I have documented the build and release process I use for my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions and also detailed how I have started to move the build phases to YAML. Well now I consider that multistage YAML pipelines are mature enough to allow me to do my whole release pipeline in YAML, hence this post. My pipeline performs a number of stages, you can find a sample pipeline here. Note that I have made every effort to extract variables into variable groups to aid reuse of the pipeline definition. I have added documentation as to where variable are stored and what they are used for. ...

I have recently hit a problem that some of my Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, that I use to build my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, are not triggering on a new PR being created on GitHub. I did not get to the bottom of why this is happening, but I found a fix. Check and of make a note of any UI declared variables in your Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline that is not triggering Delete the pipeline Re-add the pipeline, linking to the YAML file hosted on GitHub. You might be asked to re-authorise the link between Azure DevOps Pipelines and GitHub. Re-enter any variables that are declared via the Pipelines UI and save the changes Your pipeline should start to be triggered again ...

Background GitHub is a great system for individuals and OSS communities for both public and private project. However, corporate customers commonly want more control over their system than the standard GitHub offering. It is for this reason GitHub offers GitHub Enterprise. For most corporates, the essential feature that GitHub Enterprise offers is the use Single Sign On (SSO) i.e. allowing users to login to GitHub using their corporate directory accounts. I wanted to see how easy this was to setup when you are using Azure Active Directory (AAD). ...

Problem I recently tripped myself up whist adding SonarQube analysis to a rather complex Azure DevOps build. The build has two VsTest steps, both were using the same folder for their test result files. When the first VsTest task ran it created the expected .TRX and .COVERAGE files and then published its results to Azure DevOps, but when the second VsTest task ran it over wrote this folder, deleting the files already present, before it generated and published it results. ...

I wrote recently about Creating Hyper-V hosted Azure DevOps Private Agents based on the same VM images as used by Microsoft for their Hosted Agent. As discussed in that post, using this model you will recreate your build agent VMs on a regular basis, as opposed to patching them. When I came to do this recently I found that the Packer image generation was failing with errors related to accessing packages. ...

I have recently been doing a TFS 2015 to Azure DevOps Server 2019.1 upgrade for a client. The first for a while, I have been working with Azure DevOps Service mostly of late. Anyway I saw an issue I had never seen before with any version of TFS, and I could find no information on the Internet. The Problem The error occurred when I tried to queue a new build after the upgrade, the build instantly failed with the error ...

Hit a strange problem today trying to do a simple Work Item update via the Azure DevOps REST API. To do a WI update you need to call the REST API Using the verb PATCH With the Header “Content-Type” set to “application/json-patch+json” Include in the Body the current WI update revision (to make sure you are updating the current version) So the first step is to get the current WI values to find the current revision. ...

I have recently been getting a problem swapping between different organisations in Azure DevOps. It happens when I swap between Black Mable ones and customer ones, where each is back by different Azure Active Directory (AAD) but I am using the same credentials; because I am either a member of that AAD or a guest. The problem is I get into an authentication loop. It happens to be in Chrome, but you might find the same problem in other browsers. ...

I recently hit a problem with builds triggered by branch policies in Azure DevOps Repos. With the help of Microsoft I found out the problem and I thought it worth writing up uncase others hit the issue. Setup Folders Assume you have a Git repo with source for the UI, backend Services and common code in sub folders / [root] UI Services Common Branch Policies On the Master branch there are a policies of running ...

I have been trying to use Regex to select a block of an XML based .NET Core CSPROJ file, and yes before you say know I could use XPATH, but why am not is another story. I was trying to use the Regex content.match(/<PropertyGroup>((.|n)\*)</PropertyGroup>/gmi) The strange thing was this selection string worked in online Regex testers and in online Javascript IDEs, but failed inside my Node based Azure DevOps Pipeline extension. ...