The Issue Whilst migrating some Azure DevOps classic pipelines to templated multi-stage YAML, I hit a problem that a job running on a self-hosted agent would not start. The YAML stage, which required approval, would be queued and approved, but the agent would just sit there with the message Starting job but would never …

The Issue Whilst updating a client’s Duende Identity Server from versions 6 to 7, we experienced a problem. We followed the upgrade steps and all was working fine against our development instance i.e. the Identity Server Db was upgraded to the current schema and we could login from our test MVC web client without …

Problem Space There have been few times where I have landed into this particular predicament whereby either by my own doing or through the use of another’s code base, a deep nested or thoroughly utilised (parameter/variable/or other defined item) has been created with the same name as a Bicep function. As by …

The Issue Within one of our Azure DevOps builds we today started to see the following error when running the SonarQube analysis step: ##[error][SQ] Task failed with status FAILED, Error message: Unrecoverable indexing failures: 1 errors among 1 requests. Check Elasticsearch logs for further details. Nothing obvious …

Background In past years, pre Covid, Black Marble hosted a venue for the Global DevOps Bootcamp, a community run in person hackathon event. After a short hiatus, I am pleased to be able to say this event has a successor, the Global DevOps Experience which is being run on the 15th of June at many venues around the …

Issue: During the creation of a basic react app, the result of a build of this app must be displayed as a static web application hosted in GitHub pages. Solution: Configuring a GitHub action (YAML) in order to build the react app and then clone the build over to the GitHub pages deployment branch. Below is the …

Problem Space I have recently been working on an API scoped policy within API Management, the policy ideally should not be impacted by any policies defined higher up in the hierarchy. For reference, this means that any policies defined at the Product, Workspace, or Global level will not be inherited at the API scope …

The Issue We have a number of projects that use the old style SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) .RPTProj project format. These projects are not supported in Visual Studio 2022 out of the box, but there is an extension in the Marketplace that adds the functionality back so you can build them in the IDE. However, we …

Overview In API Management, users and groups are a core aspect of the Developer Portal and are used to manage the visibility and access to respective products and their APIs. One of the common questions that I often get asked is, “how do I appropriately govern the groups effectively so that I can ensure that the …

Problem One of my client’s recently had a problem that a large number of Azure DevOps work items had been updated via Excel in error. They asked if there was a means to undo these edits. Unfortunately, a feature Azure DevOps does not provide. Solution So, I wrote a PowerShell script to do it. The script… …