TechTips

Background I have been doing the regular maintenance in our Azure DevOps Pipelines of updating the versions of tasks. This usually means you perform one of the following actions Just increment the major version number in the YAML e.g task: MyTask@1 to task: MyTask@2 when there is a newer version of a task available. If the task is out of support and abandoned, swap to a different task, one that is still being supported, that does the same action. Fork the out of date task, and perform the updates to bring it back into support. Swap to a PowerShell/Bash script that wrappers a CLI tool to do the same action - increasingly my go to solution. It is a shame the first option is often not possible, but don’t get me, or other MVPs on the long running subject of abandoned insecure Azure DevOps extensions ...

I have posted in the past about the issues a misconfigured cache can have in Azure DevOps Pipelines, or GitHub Actions. Well it caught me out again today, wasting a few hours of my time. Today, I had a failing integration test in a CI/CD pipeline, but all the tests passed locally. The failing test was looking for a certain number of rows returned from a API with known seed test data. I had revised the seed data and my test, but in my CI/CD pipeline my test was failing as it was still looking for the old number of rows. ...

The Issue I recently had an issue trying to add a new Azure DevOps Pipeline Agent Pool to an existing Azure DevOps 2022 Server via the Team Project Collection Settings UI. When tried to add the agent pool I got the error Access denied needs Manage permissions to perform this action. For more information, contact the Azure DevOps Server administrator The problem was that I was the Azure DevOps Server administrator ...

The Issue I have been chasing what it turned out to be a non-existent fault when trying to ingest test code coverage data into our SonarQube instance. I saw my ‘problem’ in a .NET 8.0 solution with XUnit v3 based unit tests, this solution was being built using this Azure DevOps Pipelines YAML - task: SonarQubePrepare@7 inputs: SonarQube: "SonarQube" scannerMode: "dotnet" jdkversion: "JAVA_HOME_17_X64" projectKey: "${{ parameters.sonarQubeProjectKey }}" projectName: "${{ parameters.sonarQubeProjectName }}" projectVersion: "$(GitVersion_Major).$(GitVersion_Minor)" extraProperties: | # Additional properties that will be passed to the scanner, # Put one key=value per line, example: sonar.cpd.exclusions=**/AssemblyInfo.cs,**/*.g.cs # Ingest the test results and coverage data sonar.cs.vscoveragexml.reportsPaths=$(Agent.TempDirectory)/**/*.coveragexml sonar.cs.vstest.reportsPaths=$(Agent.TempDirectory)/**/*.trx - task: DotNetCoreCLI@2 displayName: ".NET Build" inputs: command: "build" arguments: > --configuration ${{ parameters.buildConfiguration }} --no-restore projects: "$(Build.SourcesDirectory)/src/MySolution.sln" - task: DotNetCoreCLI@2 displayName: ".NET Test" inputs: command: "test" projects: "$(Build.SourcesDirectory)/src/MySolution.sln" arguments: > --configuration ${{ parameters.buildConfiguration }} --collect "Code coverage" --no-restore --no-build - task: SonarQubeAnalyze@7 displayName: 'Complete the SonarQube analysis' inputs: jdkversion: "JAVA_HOME_17_X64" - task: SonarQubePublish@7 displayName: 'Publish Quality Gate Result' inputs: pollingTimeoutSec: "300" At the start of the SonarQubeAnalyze@7 task log I could see that the .coverage file was found and converted into a .coveragexml file. However, there were multiple ‘The device is not ready’ errors when parsing this file later in the process. ...

The Issue I have some long standing PowerBI reports that I use for summarizing project data. They use a variety of data sources, including Azure hosted SQL instances. I recently moved the Azure hosted SQL databases to a new instance as part of a major tidy up of my Azure resources. This of course caused my reports to break. I thought swapping the SQL connection details in PowerBI would be easy, and I guess it was, but it took me too long to work out how. ...

The Issue We have used SonarQube and the OWASP Dependency Checker Plugin for many years to perform analysis and vulnerability checking within our Azure DevOps Pipelines. Recently, whilst picking up an old project for a new phase of development, I came across a couple of problems due to changes in both tools since the project CI/CD pipelines were last run. The OWASP Dependency Checker vulnerabilities were not appearing in SonarQube as issues The OWASP Dependency Checker HTML report could not (always) be loaded in SonarQube The issues were just down to changes in both tools over time. It just goes to show that you can’t just setup a CI/CD system and expect it work forever, changes are always being introduced in cloud based tools. ...

Introduction Previously Rik Hepworth has posted on ‘Importing bicep lint output as test results in Azure DevOps pipelines’. In his post he showed how you could move from using the ARM-TTK to validate ARM templates to using the built inBicep Linter. Rik’s solution involved taking the Bicep Lint output and converting it via the .SARIF format to JUnit so that it could be published to an Azure DevOps pipeline run as a set of test results. ...

Introduction Last year I posted on how to create your own Azure DevOps maintenance jobs. This solution has been working well for me, until the Azure DevOps Service connection’s Entra ID Service Principle secret expired. So, I thought it well worth revisiting the creation of this maintenance job but this time using Workload Identity federation to authenticate, and hence never again have to worry about the secret expiring. Updated Setup Process Note: This is a modification to the creation of the service connection, but the core the maintenance job setup remains the same as in my original post ...

The Issue Whilst refreshing an end-to-end devops demo, one I use for both Azure DevOps and GitHub, I hit a problem. The new Playwright UX Tests, that were replacing old Selenium ones, were failing on the GitHub hosted runner. The strange thing was the same tests worked perfectly on: My local development machine The Azure DevOps hosted runner And strangest of all, a GitHub self hosted runner The Solution Adding some logging to the tests showed the actual issue was that on the GitHub hosted runner the code to count the rows in an HTML table was always returning 0. ...

The Issue I have been recently refreshing a GitHub end-to-end demo I use for talks and workshops that I had not looked at for a while. It shows how legacy code bases can be deployed with GitHub Actions and Azure App Services. The demo uses MSDeploy to deploy a ASP.NET web application to Azure App Services. The MSDeploy package is created as part of the GitHub Action workflow. The workflow uses a PowerShell script to do the deployment using the following: ...