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 …

The Problem I recently did our regular update of our Azure DevOps Private build agents. It is rare we see problems when we do this, but this time one of our very regularly run builds started to fail when running unit tests. We had not changed the project source code, all the test ran locally in Visual Studio. We had …

Problem Space I recently started working on a Git Repository (not of my own creation) that had a repository name containing spaces. As a helping hand when a repository is created with spaces in the name, the spaces are replaced with %20 when cloned … Unless otherwise specified, however, this would then need to …

Problem Space When it comes to creating Azure Storage Accounts, the name has some very important rules that need to be kept in mind. These rules will not only be important in the creation of the resource, but will be critical in deletion and reuse. The rules are as follows: Storage account names must be between 3 and …

Background | Functional Workings of APIM Subscriptions Subscriptions are a nice and easy method of securing your APIs in APIM, however as I bumped into a small detail around their use the other day, I thought it wise to note it down. Azure API Management Subscriptions operate at three scope levels: All APIs Applies to …

Problem Space Subscriptions are a nice and easy method of securing your APIs in APIM, however as I bumped into a small detail around their use the other day, I thought it wise to note it down. When a Subscription Key is required on an API, as an invoker I will need to provide either a Header or a Parameter to my …