In a modern hybrid cloud world we have to accept constant change as the norm. You can't just build something and forget about it. You have to keep it up to date as newer tools/libraries appear. This is to at least address security issues, even if you don't want to adopt the new features.

So I am expecting a degree of …

Background

One of the fundamental parts to BizTalk for both configuration and integration applications is Enterprise Single Sign On, or as we will continue to reference as SSO from now on.

SSO outside the bounds of BizTalk is an available service that is used to store and transmit encrypted user credentials. However, …

Background

An Azure Tenant is hierarchically structured with the following make up:

• Tenant
• One or more Management Groups
• One or more Subscriptions
• One or more Resource groups
• One or more Resources

Deployment Scopes {Tenant, Management Group, Subscription, Resource Group} allow us to deploy respective types of …

I posted a while ago about how I had automated the generation of social media posts for my static Hugo based website using Azure Logic Apps.

The other place I auto-generate social media posts is from releases via my project's Azure DevOps Pipeline builds. These use a YAML Pipeline Template that calls a Marketplace task …

Background

When working with Azure DevOps, you may need to access the REST API if you wish to perform scripted tasks such as creating work items, or generating reports. Historically, you had to use a Personal Access Token (PAT) to do this.

If you look in my repo of useful Azure DevOps PowerShell scripts you will find …

Background

I have recently been looking at creating multiple of the same resource using Bicep. There is however a condition where I would wish for the set of resources not to be deployed. The following stages show my work through of this particular problem (using a storage account resource as an example):

Conditional …

Background

We use Lability to build Windows Server images for our test labs. Lability makes use of Desired State Configuration (DSC) to build the VM images. Part of this process is for Lability to download DSC modules, as ZIP files, from a NuGet feed such as PowerShell Gallery to inject into the created VM image. …

Background

I have recently been playing around with some of the Bicep functions when I came across a pattern by Microsoft called the Shared Variable File Pattern.

This nifty pattern describes a method in which you can extract what would either be commonly used or complex configuration values away from your Bicep …

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 …