I make every effort keep all my Azure DevOps Pipeline extensions reliable as I know they are used by many people, but mistakes happen. Yesterday I released an updated version of my ReleaseNotes task that introduced a bug if the pipeline produced no artifacts. I am pleased to say I have fixed the bug, and addressed this …

Background At Black Marble we have our own private build agents, but they are built using the same Packer process as the Microsoft hosted ones. I recently rebuilt our agents to match the latest version of the hosted agents, and I ran into an issue with some .NET 3.1 based x86 MSTests. The tests were failing with the …

Background I was recently trying to use PowerShelGet Install-Package to install a module from an Azure DevOps Artifacts hosted PowerShell Gallery using the following script 1# For authentication use a PAT as the password, UID can be anything 2$PATcreds = Get-Credential 3Register-PSRepository -Name BM -SourceLocation …

Azure Logic Apps Azure Logic Apps is an Azure Integration Service (AIS) that provides you the ability to create and run automated workflows with little to no code. Consumption Logic Apps are developed using the visual designer within the Azure Portal. If you are new to developing Azure Logic Apps, there is great …

Problem Space I ran into a problem the other day working with the Fluent UI React component Controlled Multi-select Dropdown. As context, here is my redacted code and explanation: import { Dropdown, IDropdownOption } from 'office-ui-fabric-react'; // office-ui-fabric-react@7.204.0 export interface State { …

Background It is a really useful feature that you can expose Key Vault stored secrets as Azure DevOps pipeline variables via a variable group, but what happens when you do this? And what can you do if you try to expose too many variables? I was recently working on a system where there was an increasing number of Key …

Background I am using an Azure Function as backend for processing forms submissions from a Hugo static website, to process a simple contact form. I wanted to add reCAPTCHA support, as the site was generating too many spam emails. I also wanted to show a different confirmation pages depending on whether the reCAPTCHA …

Problem After deploying a dotnet 6 console app to a production server, I got the following error: Exception: [Could not load file or assembly 'System.Data.Odbc, Version=6.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51'. The system cannot find the file specified.] The strange thing was the same EXE, built on a …

Late last year at (DDDNorth](https://twitter.com/dddnorth) my session had the title 'Why don't people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?'. Between anecdotes, a key theme was tha people too often don't make sensible diagnostic steps. A problem caused, in my opinion, by the fact they have not been exposed …

Problem Space I have been recently working on building a new Yaml pipeline in Azure DevOps and wished to use the GitVersion Task, however, upon running the pipeline the task failed with the following error: ERROR [../../.. ..:..:..:..] An unexpected error occurred: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not …