There have been some major paradigm shifts in the history of computing with some of the most notable being marked, not only by changes in technology, but by changes in staffing that technology. When the computing standard for mainframe shifted to client/server, the staff model moved from computer operator to system …

Due to the unusual circumstances of 2020, the 15th Developer!Developer!Developer! Day will take place virtually. That means no catering or venue costs to meet, costs that are usually met via sponsorship, as we keep the cost of entry free. And I'll be covering any incidental costs incurred. However, we are still looking …

DDD Logo We had planned to run a DDD in October, but due to illness, this didn't happen (we are all well now, phew!). With Christmas so close, hadn't expected to have time to run a DDD, but with the world being as it is, we wanted to do something to bring some cheer to the Dev and IT community. Therefore we are running …

I have been wanting to return to this blog for some time, but a combination of things kept me busy. Not least of which, was a period of illness for me at the beginning of Spring, and for family at the start of September. All good now, and glad to be OK! Plus, I've been keeping myself busy producing articles over on …

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 …

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hU8gSpuPS-4

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 …

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 …

A question I am often asked when consulting on Azure DevOps is ‘how can I automatically create release notes and how can I publish them?’. 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 …

The Issue 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 …