Back in early 2016 I wrote an Azure DevOps Extension to wrapper Pester, the Powershell unit testing tool. Over the years I updated it, and then passed the support of it over to someone who knows much more about Powershell and Pester than I Chris Gardner who continued to develop it.

With the advent of cross-platform …

This is one of those blog posts I write to remind my future self how I fixed a problem.

The Problem

I have a release that installs VSTest and runs some integration tests that target .NET 4.6 x64. All these tests worked fine in Visual Studio. However, I got the following errors for all tests when they were run in a …

I decided to create a video of my blog post ‘Swapping my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions release process to use Multistage YAML pipelines’.

[iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WMQ0G9eXczE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" …

I have today released another enrichment to the dataset available in my Cross Platform Release Notes Azure Pipeline Task. It now returns an extra array of data that links work items and commits to build artifacts.

So your reporting objects are:

Array Objects

• workItems – the array of all work item associated with the …

I recently post about Enriching the data available in my Azure DevOps Pipelines Cross Platform Release Notes Task by adding Pull Request information. Well, that first release was fairly limited only working for PR validation builds, so I have made more improvements and shipped a newer version.

The task now will, as …

In the past I have documented the build and release process I use for my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions and also detailed how I have started to move the build phases to YAML.

Well now I consider that multistage YAML pipelines are mature enough to allow me to do my whole release pipeline in YAML, hence this post. …

I have recently hit a problem that some of my Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, that I use to build my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, are not triggering on a new PR being created on GitHub.

I did not get to the bottom of why this is happening, but I found a fix.

• Check and of make a note of any UI declared variables in …

Background

GitHub is a great system for individuals and OSS communities for both public and private project. However, corporate customers commonly want more control over their system than the standard GitHub offering. It is for this reason GitHub offers  GitHub Enterprise.

For most corporates, the essential feature …

I recently got a very interesting PR for my Cross-platform Release Notes Azure DevOps Pipelines Extension from Kenneth Scott. He had added a new templating engine to the task, Handlebars.

Previous to this PR the templating in the task was done with a line by line evaluation of a template that used my own mark-up. This …