I recently had the privilege to be hosted on the Azure on Air podcast by the Turbo360 team. I had a great conversation with Lex discussing the importance of a “security first” mindset in the world of Azure solutions, and how this mindset should be carried out as a priority in every stage from Requirements …

The Issue Whilst refreshing an end-to-end devops demo, one I use for both Azure DevOps and GitHub, I hit a problem. The new Playwright UX Tests, that were replacing old Selenium ones, were failing on the GitHub hosted runner. The strange thing was the same tests worked perfectly on: My local development machine The …

The Issue I have been recently refreshing a GitHub end-to-end demo I use for talks and workshops that I had not looked at for a while. It shows how legacy code bases can be deployed with GitHub Actions and Azure App Services. The demo uses MSDeploy to deploy a ASP.NET web application to Azure App Services. The MSDeploy …

Background Our on premise build agents, though using the same image as the Microsoft hosted agents (generated using Packer, as I have previously posted about), have some extra setup done by Lability as they are deployed to a Hyper-V host. Most of this is specific to the needs of running on Hyper-V e.g. setting up …

Background We have for many years based our Azure DevOps build and release pipelines on on-premise agents. This was done to provide a means to scale up each agent using ‘bigger & faster’ local VMs then the Microsoft Hosted agents provided, and to utilise spare Hyper-V hosts we had after moving services …

Azure DevOps Server 2022.2 has recently been released. Unexpectedly this minor 2022.2 release includes a change in supported versions of SQL, SQL2017 support has been dropped. So, if someone attempted an upgrade from 2022.1 to 2022.2 they will get the error “TF255146: The SQL Server instance you specified (nnnnn) …

Problem Space One of my recent projects has involved the use of a static module bundler called webpack to bundle a typescript site so I can serve static content from a Static Web App in Azure. For a while now the site content has not deviated between environments [ dev / test / prod ] and therefore we have simply built …

The Issue Yesterday I posted about converting ARM output variables to Azure DevOps pipeline variables Whilst using the pattern I discussed we hit an interesting problem. On my test pipeline I had the following YAML and it was working as expected.

• task: PowerShell@2 displayName: Obtain Azure Deployment outputs inputs: …

The Issue Historically, we have used Kees Schollaart’s ARM Outputs Azure DevOps task to convert the output from an ARM template deployment into a variable that can be used in a subsequent Azure DevOps pipeline task, using the general form

• task: AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3 displayName: Deploy the …

Introduction I have previously blogged a good deal on Azure DevOps variable evaluation, see here and here, but the saga continues… When variables exist Today I realised, something I guess should have been obvious, that when you manually queue a run, pre-defined variables such as $(Build.SourceBranchName) are not …