Passing dynamically sized object parameters to Azure DevOps Pipeline templates

The Problem I have an Azure DevOps YAML template that does some deployment actions using PowerShell. This template is used multiple locations. The problem is that the PowerShell step within the template needs a variable number of environment variables, set from values stored in an Azure DevOps variable Group. The number of variables is not fixed because they depend on the underlying commands the PowerShell script is triggering to do the deployment....

June 24, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Azure DevOps pipeline jobs failing to start

The Issue Whilst migrating some Azure DevOps classic pipelines to templated multi-stage YAML, I hit a problem that a job running on a self-hosted agent would not start. The YAML stage, which required approval, would be queued and approved, but the agent would just sit there with the message Starting job but would never start. The strange thing was even though the job was not started, the pipeline instantly showed as failed with no error message....

May 29, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Failing client connections with SQL OPENJSON Incorrect Syntax error after upgrading Identity Server 6 to 7

The Issue Whilst updating a client’s Duende Identity Server from versions 6 to 7, we experienced a problem. We followed the upgrade steps and all was working fine against our development instance i.e. the Identity Server Db was upgraded to the current schema and we could login from our test MVC web client without issues. The problem occured when we started to test using our UAT (a production replica) DB. On loading the Identity Server, it did the expected EF migrations and appeared to start, but when a client tried to connect we got an exception in the Identity Server logs in the form...

May 29, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for SonarQube recoverable indexing failures error

The Issue Within one of our Azure DevOps builds we today started to see the following error when running the SonarQube analysis step: ##[error][SQ] Task failed with status FAILED, Error message: Unrecoverable indexing failures: 1 errors among 1 requests. Check Elasticsearch logs for further details. Nothing obvious pointed to why this should have started to occur, the SonarQube logs showed nothing more than a longer version of the same message....

May 16, 2024 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Building Reporting Service .RPTProj files in Visual Studio 2022 from the command line

The Issue We have a number of projects that use the old style SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) .RPTProj project format. These projects are not supported in Visual Studio 2022 out of the box, but there is an extension in the Marketplace that adds the functionality back so you can build them in the IDE. However, we want to build our RDL files as part of our CI process, and this is where we hit a problem....

May 3, 2024 · 2 min · Richard Fennell