Since moving house a couple of years ago, I have gained an ever increasing set of apps on my phone to manage various things, such the Solaredge PV and battery system we installed and our Octopus Energy account, to name but two. In the past, I had avoided IOT and the ‘Intelligent Home’ as I did not want to …

Edited: 4th Feb 2025 to add detail on Azure DevOps Pipelines Service Connection Introduction When automating administration tasks via scripts in Azure DevOps in the past I would have commonly used the Azure DevOps REST API. However, today I tend to favour the Azure DevOps CLI. The reason for this is that the CLI …

The Issue The Azure DevOps CLI command az boards work-item update can take a list of fields as a set if value pairs e.g. az boards work-item update --id 123 --fields Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort=10 However, if you try to replace the field name with a variable in PowerShell like this $fieldname = …

Background I recently wrote about the changes I had had to make to our Azure DevOps pipelines to address the changes required when code signing with a new DigiCert certificate due to new private key storage requirements for Code Signing certificates Today I had to do the same for a GitHub Actions pipeline. The process …

This one of those posts that is more a note to self as I keep forgetting how to do this, but I hope it helps others. Background I use Microsoft’s Authenticator to provide MFA on a number of accounts. I recently swapped my Android phone and had to, after restoring a backup, re-authenticate some accounts on the new …

The Try-Catch Pattern Following the idea of defensive programming or as I like to call it for Logic Apps (being low code): defensive processing, it is considered good practice to wrap your workflows in a try-catch pattern to handle the unexpected. The pattern makes use of a mixture of Run After conditions and the Scope …

Overview Prior to the Christmas break I was involved in writing some integrations that used a mixture of Logic Apps Standard and Function Apps. It was agreed as part of the architecture that user-assigned identities would be the best fit. As part of the implementation, I observed that the differences in configuration …

Background It is becoming increasingly important to sign files digitally to ensure that they have not been tampered with, to secure the software supply chain. This is something we have done for a good while as a step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. However, recent(ish) changes in the way certificates are issued has …

I really like Web Deploy, it is a powerful tool for injecting parameters whilst deploying web applications to both Azure or an on-premise IIS Server. Every project is different, and sometimes you need to be able to inject a step into the Web Deploy package creation process to complete some extra step. This can be done …

Overview The recent work that I have been doing with Standard Logic Apps and linking them as backends to Azure API Management has relied on the use of the Logic App Workflow SAS key for security. This is a valid authentication approach, but there are risks that you need to be aware of as well as best practices that you …