I am delighted to be joining SixPivot, our amazing Australian partner, in taking part in the Safer Cities Summit in Brisbane this week. We are launching tuServ, our award-winning policing solution at the event, into the Australian market, as the first step to taken it global! I'll be joined by Faith Rees, SixPivot's …

I wrote a post recently Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline. I realised since writing it that it does not address the issue of if you wish to version your ARM Templates using Semantic Versioning. My JSON versioning task I used did not support the option of not extracting a numeric version number …

At Black Marble we have been migrating our DevTest labs to from on-premises TFS Lab Management to a mixture of on-premise and Azure hosted Lability defined Labs as discussed by Rik Hepworth on his blog. I have only been tangentially involved in this effort until recently, consuming the labs but not creating the …

After last year’s successful DDD, it will be in Reading for its thirteenth outing, on Saturday, 23th of June. Once again DDD is free for all to attend, thanks to some great sponsors – if you would like to be sponsor DDD, please email ddd@blackmarble.com. As ever I would love to see new speakers and new topics in the …

Updated 3 Feb 2018 - Also see Versioning your ARM templates within a VSTS CI/CD pipeline with Semantic Versioning Azure Resource Templates (ARM) allow your DevOps infrastructure deployments to be treated as ‘content as code’. So infrastructure definitions can be stored in source control. As with any code it is really …

As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful …

Whist adding a couple of new tasks to my VSTS Manifest Versioning Extension I hit the problem that VSIX package became too big to upload to the Marketplace. The error I saw in my CI/CD VSTS pipeline was``` ##vso[task.logissue type=error;]error: Failed Request: Bad Request(400) - The extension package size '23255292 …

In response to requests on the VSTS Marketplace I have added a pair of tasks to added/edit entries in a .JSON format files. The first is for adding a version to a file like a package.json file e.g. 1{ 2"name": "myapp", 3"version": "1.0.0", 4"license": "MIT" 5} The second …

Background I have recently been posting on using Azure to host private VSTS build/release agents to avoid agent queue deadlocking issues with more complex release pipelines. One of the areas discussed is reducing cost of running a private agent in Azure by only running the private agent within a limited time range, …

In my last post I discussed creating a private VSTS build agent within an Azure DevTest Lab on a VM with no GUI. It was pointed out to me today, by Rik Hepworth, that I had overlooked an obvious alternative way to get the VSTS agent onto the VM i.e. not having to use a series of commands at an RDP connected command …