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Keeping Azure DevOps organisations inherited process templates in sync

The problem

If you are like me for historic reasons you have multiple Azure DevOps organisations (instances) backed by the same Azure Active Directory (AAD). In my case for example: one was created when Azure DevOps was first released as TFSPreview.com and another is from our migration from on-prem TFS using the DB Migration Tools method; and I have others.

I make active use of all of these for different purposes, though one is primary with the majority of work done on it, and so I want to make sure the inherited process templates are the same on each of them. Using the primary organisation as the master customisation.

Note I have already converted all my old on-premises XML process models to inherited process templates.

There is no out the box way to do keep processes in syncs, but it is possible using a few tools. The main one is the Microsoft Process Migrator for Node on GitHub.

The Solution

Firstly I cloned the Microsoft Process Migrator and built it as per the instructions on the repo.

I created a config file and then ran the tool. On one organisation it ran fine. However on another I had errors like:

[ERROR] [2018-11-26T14:35:44.880Z] Process import validation failed. Process with same name already exists on target account.
[ERROR] [2018-11-26T14:39:54.206Z] Import failed, see log file for details. Create field ‘Location’ failed, see log for details

This was because I had in the past manually duplicated the inherited process template onto this organisation, so there was a process with the same name and fields of the same names.

The first error was easy to fix, import the template with a new (temporary) name.

The second is more problematic. I had two choice

As I only had a few duplicated unused fields on a single organisation I picked the former. If I had many organisations to sort out I would picked the latter.

So my process ended up being

  1. Run the Microsoft Process Migrator to migrate ‘My Process’ on the source organisation to ‘My Process 1’ on the target organisation
  2. It gave an error, providing the name of the duplicated field
  3. I checked on the target organisation using a work item query that the field was empty or only had defaulted data (if it had not been I would have used Martin’s tool to migrate the data to a temporary field and then deleted the problem field, moving the data back to the correct field from the temporary field when the import of the process template was completed)
  4. I deleted the field from the work item type that referenced it
  5. I deleted the field
  6. I deleted the process template ‘My Process 1’, a failed import leaves a half created process
  7. I went back to step 1 and repeated until the import completed without error
  8. I tested my migrated inherited process was OK
  9. On the target organisation I then renamed ‘My Process’ to ‘My Process – Old’
  10. I then renamed ‘My Process 1’ to ‘My Process’
  11. In my case I also made ‘My Process’ as the default, you might not do this if another process is the default, but step 13 does require the process template is not the default
  12. I moved all the team projects using the process template now called ‘My Process – Old’ to ‘My Process’
  13. I was then able to delete the process template ‘My Process – Old’ as it has no associated team projects and was not the default

As I customise my primary organisation’s process templates I can repeat this process to keep the processes in sync between organisations.  Note that in future migrations I won’t have to do steps 2..6 as there are no manually created duplicated fields. So it should be more straight forward.

So a valid solution until any similar functionality is built into Azure DevOps, and there is no sign of that on the roadmap.

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DPI problems after upgrading from Camtasia 8 to 2018

This is another of those posts I do so I don’t forget how I fixed something.

I have a requirement to record videos for a client in 720p resolution. As I use as SurfaceBook with a High-Res screen I have found the best way to do this is set my Windows screen resolution to 1280×720 and do all my recording at this as native resolution. Any attempt to record smaller portions of a screen or scale video in production have lead to quality problems, especially as remote desktops within remote desktops are required.

This has been working fine with Camtasia 8, but when I upgrade to Camtasia  2018.0.7 I got problems. The whole UI of the tool was unusable, it ignored the resizing/DPI changes.

The only fix I could find was to create a desktop shortcut to the EXE and set the Properties > Compatibility > Change high DPI settings > and check the ‘Override high DPI scaling behaviour’ and set this to ‘System’.

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Even after doing this I still found the preview in the editing screen a little blurred, but usable. The final produced MP4s were OK.

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Just released a new Azure Pipelines Extension to update Git based WIKIs

I have just release a new Azure DevOps Pipelines extension to update a page in a Git based WIKI. 

It has been tested again

  • Azure DevOps WIKI – running as the build agent (so the same Team Project)
  • Azure DevOps WIKI – using provided credentials (so any Team Project)
  • GitHub – using provided credentials

It takes a string (markdown) input and writes it to a new page, or updates it if it already exists. It is designed to be used with my Generate Release Notes Extension, but you will no doubt find other uses

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SharePoint 2010 Integrations with TFS 2017.3

An interesting aspect of a TFS Upgrade I found myself in recently was to do with SharePoint Integrations with Team Foundation Server. As a bit of a pre-amble, back in the day, when TFS was a bit more primitive, it didn’t have a rich dashboard experience like it does today, and so leaned on it’s distant cousin SharePoint for Project Portal support. A lot of my customers as a consequence of this have significant document repositories in SharePoint Foundation instances installed as part of their Team Foundation Server installations. This in itself isn’t an issue, as you can decouple a SharePoint server from TFS and have the two operate independently of one another, but some users will miss the “Navigate to Project Portal” button from their project dashboard.

I found an easy answer to this is to use the Mark Down widget to give them the link they want/need so they can still access their project documentation, but of course the work item and report add-ins will cease to function. Encouraging users to adopt the newer TFS/Azure Dev Ops Dashboards is key here.

But enough waffling. A technical conundrum faced in this recent upgrade I thought worth mentioning was around the SharePoint integrations themselves. The customer was migrating from a 2012.4 server to a 2017.3 server (as tempting as 2018.3 was, IT governance in their organization meant SQL 2016 onwards was a no no). Their old TFS server was cohabiting with a SharePoint Foundation 2010 server which was their BA’s document repository and point of entry for having a look at the state of play for each Team Project. The server had two Team Project Collections for two different teams who were getting two shiny new TFS Servers.

One team was going to the brand new world and still needed the SharePoint integrations. The other was going to the new world with no SharePoint (huzzah!). Initially the customer had wanted to move the SharePoint server to one of the new servers, and thus be able to decommission the old Windows Server 2008R2 server it was living on.

This proved to be problematic in that the new server was on Windows Server 2016, which even had we upgraded SharePoint to the last version which supported TFS integration which was SharePoint 2013, 2013 is too old and creaky to run on Windows Server 2016. So we had to leave the SharePoint server where it was. This then presented a new problem. According to the official documentation, to point the SharePoint 2010 server at TFS 2017 I would have had to install the 2010 Connectivity Extensions which shipped with the version of TFS I was using. So that would be TFS 2017’s SharePoint 2010 extensions. But we already had a set of SharePoint 2010 extensions installed on that server….specifically TFS 2012’s SharePoint 2010 extensions.

To install 2017’s version of the extensions I’d have had to uninstall or upgrade TFS 2012.4 since two versions of TFS don’t really like cohabiting on the same server and the newer version tends to try (helpfully I should stress) upgrading the older version. The customer didn’t like the idea of their fall-back/mothballed server being rendered unusable if they needed to spin it up again. This left me in something of a pickle between a rock and a hard place.

So on a hunch I figured why not go off the beaten path and ignore the official documentation (something I don’t make a habit of), and suggested to the customer “let’s just point the TFS 2012’s SharePoint 2010 extensions at TFS 2017 and see what happens!”. So, I reconfigured the SharePoint 2010 Extensions the TFS 2017 Admin console and guess what? Worked like a charm. The SharePoint 2010 Project Portals quite happily talked to the TFS 2017 Server with no hiccups and no loss of functionality.

Were I to make an educated guess, I’d say the TFS 2017, SharePoint 2010 extensions are the same as TFS 2012’s but with a new sticker on the front, or only minor changes.

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TFS 2018.3 Upgrade–Where’s my Code Content in the Code Hub?

Firstly it’s been a while (about 4 years or so) since I last blogged, and so there’s going to be a bit of a gap in what I blog about now versus what I used to blog about. Why the big gap, and what’s been happening between I might talk about in a future post but for now I thought I’d share a recent war story of a TFS Upgrade gone wrong, which had a pretty arcane error.

The client had previously been using an on-premise TFS 2012.4 server and had expressed an interest in upgrading to a newer version,  TFS 2018.3 to be precise.

Naturally our first recommendation was to move to Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, VSO) but this wasn’t a good fit for them at the point in time, issues around Data sovereignty and all that and Brexit generally putting the spook into everyone in the UK who had been eyeing the European Data Centres.

Non the less we built some future proofing into the new TFS server we built and configured for them, chiefly using SQL Server 2017 to mitigate any problems with them updating to Azure DevOps Server 2019/2020 which is due for release before the end of the year, or just after the turn of the year if the previous release cadence of TFS is any indicator.

We performed a dry-run upgrade installation, and then a production run, the client I suspect brushed through their dry-run testing a little too quickly and failed to notice an issue which appeared in the production run.


There was no content in the Code Hub file content.

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Opening the Editor also just showed a blank editing pane. Examining the page load using web debugging tools showed us the following javascript error.

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: Script error for “BuiltInExtensions/Scripts/TFS.Extension”
http://requirejs.org/docs/errors.html#scripterror

We also saw certain page assets failing to load in the network trace.

image

Editor.main.css looked to be quite important given the context of the page we were in. It was also noted in the network trace we had quite a number of 401’s and many of the page assets were not displaying correctly in TFS (like the Management/Admin Cog, the TFS logo in the top right, folder and branch icons in the Code Hub source control navigator). We were stumped at first, a support call from Microsoft in the end illuminated us to the issue. The client had a group policy setting which prevented membership of a role assignment in Local Policies from being modified.

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When adding the IIS feature to Windows Server, the local user group IIS_IUSRS normally gets added to this role. In the clients case, because of this group policy setting which prevented role assignments from being made, this had not occurred. No error had been raised in the feature enablement, and so no one knew anything had gone amiss when setting up the server.

This local user group contains (as I understand it) the application pool identities when creating application pools in IIS. TFS’s app pool needs this impersonation policy to load certain page assets as the currently signed in user. Some group policy changes later we were able to add the local group this by hand and resolve the issue (combined with an iisreset command). It’s been explained to me this used to be a more common error back in the days of TFS 2010 and 2012 but is something of a rarity these days hence no luck with any Google-Fu or other inquiries we made to the error.

Interestingly a week later I was performing another TFS Upgrade for a different client, they were going to TFS 2017.3 and the Code Hub, Extension Management, and Dashboards were affected by the same error, fortunately recent experience helped us resolve that quickly.


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DDD North is Coming

I am super happy to announce that DDD North is set to appear on February the 9th in the Sunny Northern City of Hull

The Amazing people at Hull University have arranged the venue and we will be shortly announcing call for sessions and dates for ticket availability.

We had hoped to have DDD this side of Christmas but with such a great opportunity available we felt we could wait a bit

I look forward to seeing a lot of old and new faces at the next DDD

b.


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Azure DevOps Services & Server Alerts DSL – an alternative to TFS Aggregator?

Whilst listening to a recent  Radio TFS it was mentioned that TFS Aggregator uses the C# SOAP based Azure DevOps APIs; hence needed a major re-write as these APIs are being deprecated.

Did you know that there was a REST API alternative to TFS Aggregator?

My Azure DevOps Services & Server Alerts DSL is out there, and has been for a while, but I don’t think used by many people. It aims to do the same as TFS Aggregator, but is based around Python scripting.

However, I do have to say it is more limited in flexibility as it has only been developed for my (and a few of my clients needs), but its an alternative that is based on the REST APIs. 

Scripts are of the following form, this one changes the state of a work item if all it children are done

import sys
# Expect 2 args the event type and a value unique ID for the wi
if sys.argv[0] == "workitem.updated" : 
    wi = GetWorkItem(int(sys.argv[1]))
    parentwi = GetParentWorkItem(wi)
    if parentwi == None:
        LogInfoMessage("Work item '" + str(wi.id) + "' has no parent")
    else:
        LogInfoMessage("Work item '" + str(wi.id) + "' has parent '" + str(parentwi.id) + "'")

        results = [c for c in GetChildWorkItems(parentwi) if c["fields"]["System.State"] != "Done"]
        if  len(results) == 0 :
            LogInfoMessage("All child work items are 'Done'")
            parentwi["fields"]["System.State"] = "Done"
            UpdateWorkItem(parentwi)
            msg = "Work item '" + str(parentwi.id) + "' has been set as 'Done' as all its child work items are done"
            SendEmail("richard@blackmarble.co.uk","Work item '" + str(parentwi.id) + "' has been updated", msg)
            LogInfoMessage(msg)
        else:
            LogInfoMessage("Not all child work items are 'Done'")
else:
	LogErrorMessage("Was not expecting to get here")
	LogErrorMessage(sys.argv)

I have recently done a fairly major update to the project. The key changes are:

  • Rename of project, repo, and namespaces to reflect Azure DevOps (the namespace change is a breaking change for existing users)
  • The scripts that are run can now be
    • A fixed file name for the web instance running the service
    • Based on the event type sent to the service
    • Use the subscription ID, thus allowing many scripts (new)
  • A single instance of the web site running the events processor can now handle calls from many Azure DevOps instances.
  • Improved installation process on Azure (well at least tried to make the documentation clearer and sort out a couple of MSDeploy issues)

Full details are on the project can be seen on the solutions WIKI, maybe you will find it of use. Let me know if the documentation is good enough

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YAML documentation for my Azure Pipeline Tasks (and how I generated it)

There is a general move in Azure DevOps Pipelines to using YAML, as opposed to the designer, to define your pipelines. This is particularly enforced when using them via the new GitHub Marketplace Azure Pipelines method where YAML appears to be the only option.

This has shown up a hole in my Pipeline Tasks documentation, I had nothing on YAML!

So I have added a YAML usage page for each set of tasks in each of my extensions e.g the file utilities tasks.

Now, as are most developers, I am lazy. I was not going to type all that information. So I wrote a script to generate the markdown from respective task.json files in the repo. Now this script will need some work for others to use as it relies on some special handling due to quirks of my directory structure, but I hope it will be of use to others.

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Microsoft post root cause analysis on recent Azure DevOps Issues

Azure DevOps has had some serious issue over the past couple of weeks with availability here in Europe.

A really good open and detailed root cause analysis has just been posted by the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. It also covers the mitigations they are putting place to make sure this same issues do not occur again.

We all have to remember that the cloud is not magic. Cloud service providers will have problems like any on-premise services; but trying to hide them does nothing to build confidence. So I for one applaud posts like this. I just wish all cloud service providers were as open when problem occur.

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Using Paths in PR Triggers on an Azure DevOps Pipelines Builds

When I started creating OSS extensions for Azure DevOps Pipelines (starting on TFSPreview, then VSO, then VSTS and now named Azure DevOps) I made the mistake of putting all my extensions in a single GitHub repo. I thought this would make life easier, I was wrong, it should have been a repo per extension.

I have considered splitting the GitHub repo, but as a number of people have forked it, over 100 at the last count, I did not want to start a chain of chaos for loads of people.

This initial choice has meant that until very recently I could not use the Pull Request triggers in Azure DevOps Pipelines against my GitHub repo. This was because all builds associated with the repo triggered on any extension PR. So, I had to trigger builds manually, providing the branch name by hand. A bit of a pain, and prone to error.

I am pleased to say that with the roll out of Sprint 140 we now get the option to add a path filter to PR triggers on builds linked to GitHub repo; something we have had for Azure DevOps hosted Git repos since Sprint 126.

So now my release process is improved. If I add a path filter as shown below, my build and hence release process trigger on a PR just as I need.

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It is just a shame that the GitHub PR only checks the build, not the whole release, before saying all is OK. Hope we see linking to complete Azure DevOps Pipelines in the future.