You can do this by hand within the Pipeline UI, with a lot of cut and pasting, but much easier is to use the excellent Yamlizr – Azure DevOps Classic-to-YAML Pipelines CLI from Alex Vincent. A single CLI command exports everything with a Team project into a neat folder structure of template base YAML.
I have had a ThinkPad Active Pen (model SD60G957200) ever since I got my Lenovo X1 Carbon Extreme.
The pen, when it works, has worked well. However, the problem has been that whether the pen and PC detected each other seemed very hit and miss.
Today I found the root cause. It was not drivers or dodgy Bluetooth as I had thought, but a weak spring inside the pen. It was not so weak that the battery rattled, but weak enough that the electrical circuit was not being closed reliably on the battery.
The fix was to replace the weak spring with new one out of an old ball point pen. Once this was done the pen became instantly reliable.
Wish I had spotted that sooner.
Updated 11 Nov 2020: I may have spoken too soon, it is back to it’s old behaviour today đ
However, I think it could just be the AAAA battery. Seems it is not a good idea to leave a battery in when the pen is not is use given the pen has no power switch.
The Black Live Matter movement has engendered many conversations, hopefully starting changes for the good. Often these changes involve the use of language. One such change has been the move to stop using the name master and switching to the name main for the trunk/default branch in Git repos. This change is moving apace driven by tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps .
I have recently had need, for the first time since swapping my default branch name in new repos to main, to use Semantic Version and the GitVersion tool.
‘Out of the box’ I hit a problem. The current shipping version of GitVersion (5.3.2) by default makes the assumption that’s the trunk branch is called master. Hence, throws an exception if this branch cannot be found.
Looking at the project’s repo you can find PRs, tagged for a future release, that address this constraint. However, you don’t have to wait for a new version to ship to use this excellent tool in repos with other branch naming conventions.
The solution is to create an override file GitVersion.yml in the root of your repo with the following content to alter the Regex used to find branches. Note that the content below is as a minimum, you can override any other default configuration values in this file as needed.
branches: master: regex: ^master$|^main$
With this override file the default branch can be either master or main.
You can of course use a different name or limit the Regex to a single name as you need.
Azure DevOps YAML base pipelines allow the pipeline definitions to be treated like any other code. So you make changes in a branch and PR them into the main/trunk when they are approved.
This works well if all the YAML files are in the same repo, but not so well if you are using YAML templates and the templated YAML is stored in a different repo. This is because an Azure DevOps PR is limited to a single repo. So testing a change to a YAML template in a different repo needs a bit of thought.
Say for example you have a template called core.yml in a repo called YAMLTemplates and you make a change to it and start a PR. Unless you have a test YAML pipeline in that repo, which is not a stupid idea, but not always possible depending on the complexity of your build process, there is no way to test the change inside that repo.
The answer is to create a temporary branch in a repo that consumes the shared YAML template. In this temporary branch make an edit to the repository setting that references the shared YAML repo to point to the update branch contain the PR
resources: repositories:   - repository: YAMLTemplates    type: git    name: 'Git Project/YAMLTemplates' # defaults to ref: 'refs/heads/master' ref: 'refs/heads/newbranch'
You don’t need to make any change to the line where the template is used
A question I am often asked when consulting on Azure DevOps is âhow can I automatically create release notes and how can I publish them?â.
Well it is for just this requirement that I have written a set of Azure DevOps Pipeline Tasks
Release Note Generator – to generate release notes. I strongly recommend this Cross-platform Node-based version. I plan to deprecate my older PowerShell version in the not too distant future as it uses âhomegrown logicâ, as opposed to standard Azure DevOps API calls, to get associated items.
WIKI PDF Generator – to convert a generated page, or whole WIKI, to PDF format.
So lets deal with these tools in turn
Generating Release Notes
The Release Note task generates release notes by getting the items associated with a build (or release) from the Azure DevOps API and generating a document based on a Handlebars based template.
The artefacts that can be included in the release notes are details of the build/release and associated Work Items, Commits/Changesets, Tests and Pull Requests.
Most of the sample templates provided are for markdown format files. However, they could easily be converted for other text-based formats such as HTML if needed.
Once the document has been generated there is a need for a decision as to how to publish it. TThere are a few options
Attach the markdown file as an artefact to the Build or Pipeline. Note you canât do this with a UI based Releases as they have no concept of artefacts, but this is becoming less of a concern as people move to multistage YAML.
Save in some other location e.g Azure Storage or if on-premises a UNC file share
Convert the markdown release note document, or the whole WIKI, to a PDF and use any of the above options using first my WIKI PDF Exporter Task then another task.
I personally favour the 1st and 4th options used together. Attachment to the pipeline and then upload the document to a WIKI
A sample of suitable YAML is shown below, uploading the document to an Azure DevOps WIKI. Please note that the repo URL and authentication can trip you up here so have a good read of the provided documentation before you use this task.
- task: richardfennellBM.BM-VSTS-WIKIUpdater-Tasks.WikiUpdaterTask.WikiUpdaterTask@1
displayName: 'Git based WIKI Updater'
inputs:
repo: 'dev.azure.com/richardfennell/Git%20project/_git/Git-project.wiki'
filename: 'xPlatReleaseNotes/build-Windows-handlebars.md'
dataIsFile: true
sourceFile: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)inline.md'
message: 'Update from Build'
gitname: builduser
gitemail: 'build@demo'
useAgentToken: true
But when do I generate the release notes?
I would suggest you always generate release notes every build/pipeline i.e. a document of the changes since the last successful build/pipeline of that build definition. This should be attached as an artefact.
However, this per build document will usually too granular for use as âtrueâ release notes i.e. something to hand to a QA team, auditor or client.
To address this second use case I suggest, within a multistage YAML pipeline (or a UI based release), having a stage specifically for generating release notes.
My task has a feature that it will check for the last successful release of a pipeline/release to the stage it is defined in, so will base the release note on the last successful release to that given stage. If this ‘documentation’ stage is only run when you are doing a âformalâ release, the release note generated will be since the last formal release. Exactly what a QA team or auditor or client might want.
In conclusion
So I hope that this post provides some ideas as to how you can use my tasks generate some useful release notes.
I have an Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipeline that started giving the error `The pipeline is not valid error: Unable to resolve latest version for pipeline templates: this could be due to inaccessible pipeline or no version is available` and failing instantly.
The Solution
This is not the most helpful message, but after some digging I found the problem.
A common question I get when people are using my Release Notes task for Azure DevOps is whether it is possible to get the release notes as a PDF.
In the past, the answer was that I did not know of any easy way. However, I have recently come across a command line tool by Max Melcher called AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport that allows you to export a whole WIKI (or a single file) as a PDF. Its basic usage is
Clone a WIKI Repo
Run the command line tool passing in a path to the root of the cloned repo
The .order file is read
A PDF is generated
This is a nice and simple process, but it would be nice to be able to automate this process as part of a build pipeline.
After a bit of thought, I realised I had much of the code I needed to automated the process in my WIKIUpdater extension as these tasks are based around cloning repos.
Downloads the latest release of the WikiPDFExport tool from GitHub to the build agent (the exe is too big to include in the VSIX package)
Optionally clone a Git based WIKI repo. As with my WikIUpdater tasks, you can pass credentials for Azure DevOps or GitHub
Generate a PDF of a single file or the whole of a Wiki folder structure (based on the .order file) that was either cloned or was already present on the agent
So hopefully this new extension will give teams another way to present their release notes, whether it be an export of a whole WIKI or just a single page.
Disks filling up on our private Azure DevOps agents is a constant battle. We have maintenance jobs setup on the agent pools, to clean out old build working folders nightly, but these donât run often enough. We need a clean out more than once a day due to the number and size of our builds.
To address this, with UI based builds, we successfully used the Post Build Cleanup Extension. However since we have moved many of our builds to YAML we found it not working so well. Turned out the problem was due to the way got source code.
The Post Build Cleanup task is intelligent, it does not just delete folders on demand. It check to see what the Get Source âCleanâ setting was when the repo was cloned and bases what it deletes on this value e.g. nothing, source, or everything. This behaviour is not that obvious.
In a UI based builds it is easy to check this setting. You are always in the UI when editing the build. However, in YAML it is easy to forget the setting, as it is one of those few values that cannot be set in YAML.
To make the post build cleanup task actually delete folders in a YAML pipeline you need to
Edit the pipeline
Click the ellipse menu top right
Pick Triggers
Pick YAML and select the âGet Sourceâ block
Make sure the âCleanâ setting is set to âtrueâ and the right set of items to delete are selected â if this is not done the post clean up task does nothing
You can then add the post build cleanup task the end of the steps
steps:
- script: echo This where you do stuff
- task: mspremier.PostBuildCleanup.PostBuildCleanup-task.PostBuildCleanup@3
displayName: 'Clean Agent Directories'
condition: always()
During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift‘ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work.
Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively Zwift’ing, but it’s other functions were OK.
After much fiddling I found the issue was the network connection from my PC up to Zwift and nothing to do with the phone app. But in case it is of any use to others here are the steps I took to
My local wireless environment is now very congested, I assume as more people are working from home.
Both the 2.4GHz and 5Ghz network were on the same channels as other strong signals.
Also they were using the same SSID, which is meant to provide seamless swap-over between 2.4 and 5Ghz. But, in reality this meant there were connection problems as a connection flipped between frequencies.
This explained other problems I had seem
The Microsoft Direct Access VPN I use to connect to the office failing intermittently. Obviously, any problems I have connecting to the office to do work is far less important than Zwift connection issues.
My Samsung phone would drop calls for no reason. I now think this was when it had decided to use Wifi calling and got confused over networks. Note: I had fixed this by switching off Wifi calling.
To address the problems I changed the SSIDs so that my 2.4 and 5Ghz networks had different names, so that I know which one I was using. Also I moved the channels to ones not used by my neighbours
Test
Result
Put the phone and the PC on the 2.4Ghz network
No improvement, app did not work and PC slow to save
Put the phone and the PC on 5Ghz
Small improvement, app still did not work but at least tried to show the in game view before it dropped out. The PC was still slow to save
So it seems the problem was upload speed from my PC all along. Strange as I would have expected the 5Ghz network to be fine, even if the 2.4Ghz was not. The 5Ghz Wifi seems to perform OK on a speed test.
Anyway it is working now, but maybe it is time to consider a proper mesh network?
Whilst doing a migration from an on-premised TFS to Azure DevOps Services for a client I had a strange issue with SQLPackage.exe.
I had previously completed the dry run of the migration without any issues and started the live migration with a fully defined process and timings for a each stage.
When I came to export the detached Team Project Collection DB I ran the same command as I had for the dry run
I had expected this to take around 30 minutes. However it failed after 10 minutes with an error when trying to export the schema ‘Timeout, cannot reconnect to the database’.
This was strange as nothing had changed on the system since the dry-run. I tried all of the following with no effect
Just running the command again, you can hope!
Restarted SQL and ran the command again
Tried the export from SQL Management Studio as opposed to the command line , this just seems to hang at the same point.
The Solution
What resolved the problem was a complete reboot of the virtual machine. I assume the issue was some locked resource, but not idea why.
Updated 29th July 2020
I had the same problem with another client upgrade. This time a reboot did not fix it.
The solution at this site was to upgrade SQLPackage from the 140 32bit version to the 64bit 150 version. Once this was done the command ran without a problem
