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 …

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 …