BM-Bloggers

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 thought, but a weak spring inside the pen. It was not so weak that the battery rattled, but weak enough that the electrical circuit was not being closed reliably on the battery.

The fix was to replace the weak spring with new one out of an old ball point pen. Once this was done the pen became instantly reliable.

Wish I had spotted that sooner.

Updated 11 Nov 2020: I may have spoken too soon, it is back to it’s old behaviour today 🙁

However, I think it could just be the AAAA battery. Seems it is not a good idea to leave a battery in when the pen is not is use given the pen has no power switch.

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 apace driven by tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps .

I have recently had need, for the first time since swapping my default branch name in new repos to main, to use Semantic Version and the GitVersion tool.

‘Out of the box’ I hit a problem. The current shipping version of GitVersion (5.3.2) by default makes the assumption that’s the trunk branch is called master. Hence, throws an exception if this branch cannot be found.

Looking at the project’s repo you can find PRs, tagged for a future release, that address this constraint. However, you don’t have to wait for a new version to ship to use this excellent tool in repos with other branch naming conventions.

The solution is to create an override file GitVersion.yml in the root of your repo with the following content to alter the Regex used to find branches. Note that the content below is as a minimum, you can override any other default configuration values in this file as needed.

branches:
   master:
      regex: ^master$|^main$

With this override file the default branch can be either master or main.

You can of course use a different name or limit the Regex to a single name as you need.

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 stored in a different repo. This is because an Azure DevOps PR is limited to a single repo. So testing a change to a YAML template in a different repo needs a bit of thought.

Say for example you have a template called core.yml in a repo called YAMLTemplates and you make a change to it and start a PR. Unless you have a test YAML pipeline in that repo, which is not a stupid idea, but not always possible depending on the complexity of your build process, there is no way to test the change inside that repo.

The answer is to create a temporary branch in a repo that consumes the shared YAML template. In this temporary branch make an edit to the repository setting that references the shared YAML repo to point to the update branch contain the PR

resources: 
repositories:
  - repository: YAMLTemplates
   type: git
   name: 'Git Project/YAMLTemplates'
# defaults to ref: 'refs/heads/master'
ref: 'refs/heads/newbranch'

You don’t need to make any change to the line where the template is used

extends:  
template: core.yml@YAMLTemplates
  parameters:
    customer: ${{parameters.Customer}}
    useSonarQube: ${{parameters.useSonarQube}}

You can then use this updated pipeline to validated your PR. Once you are happy it works you can

1. Complete the PR in the YAML Templates repo
2. Delete the temporary branch in your consuming repo.