The Problem

I have posted in the past about caching the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) used by Jeremy Long’s DependencyCheck tool via the associated Azure DevOps task.

Today I had an issue that on one pipeline the Azure DevOps task was reporting the following error

Starting: Dependency Check …

The Problem

I recently came across a problem with a complex BitTalk solution being built in an Azure DevOps Pipeline. It had been working fine, but it started to fail with error related to failing to copy built DLLs from the obj folder to the bin folder because it said the files were in use by MSBuild.

The Analysis

I …

lewiswrites http://lewispen.github.io/posts/fabric-capacity-conundrum/ -

The Question That Started It All

I went down a surprisingly deep rabbit hole recently trying to answer a deceptively simple question: Do we need one Microsoft Fabric capacity, or separate ones for Dev/Test/Prod?

On paper, this sounds like a sizing …

Whilst at DDD South West I did a very enjoyable panel podcast recording for Dan Clarke’s Unhandled Exception podcast on the subject of the impact of AI on software development.

I am please to say that the recording of the panel has just been published. So why not have a listen to it, or any of Dan’s back …

Thanks to everyone who came to my session ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?` at yesterday’s DDD South West.

I don’t believe there is a recording of this session from any event where I have delivered it, but you can find a copy of my slides, with all my other …

AWS Summit London 2026

AWS Summit London 2026 was a compact, fast-moving event with practical sessions. The theme was “Innovate at Scale,” and the show was heavy on AI, sustainability, and hybrid cloud.

Opening Keynote

• Main focus: resilience, scale, and customer-driven innovation.
• Graviton4 expansion: …

Problem Space

In most Infrastructure as Code teams, Bicep quality checks start to look mature as soon as linting and deployment validation are in place. In practice, there is still a blind spot: logic-level testing of exported functions, types, and variables.

Most teams validate by deploying to a subscription and …

Problem Space

I recently had to troubleshoot an issue where two App Registrations in the same tenant had the same display name.

Azure allows this. Operationally, it hurts.

When names are duplicated, diagnosis gets slower and riskier because engineers cannot trust what they see first in the portal.

Why It Matters …

⚠️ NOTE

Microsoft guidance is clear that Azure RBAC should be used for data plane authorization moving forward, instead of legacy access policies

• Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) vs. access policies (legacy)
• Provide access to Key Vault keys, certificates, and secrets with Azure role-based access control …

Problem Space

As Bicep adoption grows, so does the complexity of the environments and teams using it. Without clear authoring practices, Bicep codebases can quickly become inconsistent, hard to maintain, and error-prone. In this post I wanted to share some practical authoring practices and anti-patterns to help you and …