And another new feature for my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Task - commit/changeset file details

The addition of Handlebars based templating for my Cross Platform Release Notes Task has certainly made it much easier to release new features. The legacy templating model it seem is what had been holding development back. In the past month or so I have added support for generating release notes based on PRs and Tests. I am now happy to say I have just added support for the actual files associated with a commit or changeset....

May 20, 2020 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Another feature for my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Extension–access to test results

Over the weekend I got another new feature for my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Extension working. The test results associated with build artefacts or releases are now exposed to Handlebars based templates. The new objects you can access are: In builds tests – all the test run as part of current build In releases tests – all the test run as part of any current build artefacts or previous to the running of the release notes task within a release environment...

May 18, 2020 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Announcing the deprecation of my Azure DevOps Pester Extension as it has been migrated to the Pester Project and republished under a new ID

Back in early 2016 I wrote an Azure DevOps Extension to wrapper Pester, the Powershell unit testing tool. Over the years I updated it, and then passed the support of it over to someone who knows much more about Powershell and Pester than I Chris Gardner who continued to develop it. With the advent of cross-platform Powershell Core we realized that the current extension implementation had a fundamental limitation. Azure DevOps Tasks can only be executed by the agent using the Windows version of Powershell or Node....

May 3, 2020 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for ‘System.BadImageFormatException’ when running x64 based tests inside a Azure DevOps Release

This is one of those blog posts I write to remind my future self how I fixed a problem. The Problem I have a release that installs VSTest and runs some integration tests that target .NET 4.6 x64. All these tests worked fine in Visual Studio. However, I got the following errors for all tests when they were run in a release 2020-04-23T09:30:38.7544708Z vstest.console.exe "C:agent\_workr1aPaymentServicesdroptestartifactsPaymentService.IntegrationTests.dll" 2020-04-23T09:30:38.7545688Z /Settings:"C:agent\_work\_tempuxykzf03ik2.tmp.runsettings" 2020-04-23T09:30:38.7545808Z /Logger:"trx" 2020-04-23T09:30:38.7545937Z /TestAdapterPath:"C:agent\_workr1aPaymentServicesdroptestartifacts" 2020-04-23T09:30:39....

April 23, 2020 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

I decided to create a video of my blog post on Multistage YAML pipelines

I decided to create a video of my blog post ‘Swapping my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions release process to use Multistage YAML pipelines’. [iframe width=“560” height=“315” src=“https://www.youtube.com/embed/WMQ0G9eXczE" frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen=”" allow=“accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture”] The video up on YouTube

April 22, 2020 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

And more enriching the data available in my Azure DevOps Pipelines Cross Platform Release Notes Task

I have today released another enrichment to the dataset available in my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure Pipeline Task. It now returns an extra array of data that links work items and commits to build artifacts. So your reporting objects are: Array Objects workItems – the array of all work item associated with the release commits – the array of all commits associated with the release pullRequests - the array of all PRs referenced by the commits in the release...

April 21, 2020 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Further enriching the data available in my Azure DevOps Pipelines Cross Platform Release Notes Task

I recently post about Enriching the data available in my Azure DevOps Pipelines Cross Platform Release Notes Task by adding Pull Request information. Well, that first release was fairly limited only working for PR validation builds, so I have made more improvements and shipped a newer version. The task now will, as well as checking for PR build trigger, try to associate the commits associated with a build/release pipeline to any completed PRs in the repo....

April 15, 2020 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Swapping my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions release process to use Multistage YAML pipelines

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....

April 7, 2020 · 6 min · Richard Fennell

My Azure DevOps Pipeline is not triggering on a GitHub Pull request - fixed

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....

April 7, 2020 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Enriching the data available in my Azure DevOps Pipelines Cross Platform Release Notes Task

A common request for my Generate Release Notes Tasks is to enrich the data available beyond basic build, work item and commit/changeset details. I have resisted these requests as it felt like a never ending journey to start. However, I have now relented and added the option to see any pull request information available. This feature is limited, you obviously have to be using artifacts that linked to a Git repo, and also the Git repo have to on an Azure DevOps hosted repository....

April 4, 2020 · 2 min · Richard Fennell