Since moving house a couple of years ago, I have gained an ever increasing set of apps on my phone to manage various things, such the Solaredge PV and battery system we installed and our Octopus Energy account, to name but two.

In the past, I had avoided IOT and the ‘Intelligent Home’ as I did not want to …

Edited: 4th Feb 2025 to add detail on Azure DevOps Pipelines Service Connection

Introduction

When automating administration tasks via scripts in Azure DevOps in the past I would have commonly used the Azure DevOps REST API. However, today I tend to favour the Azure DevOps CLI. The reason for this is that the CLI …

The Issue

The Azure DevOps CLI command az boards work-item update can take a list of fields as a set if value pairs e.g.

az boards work-item update  --id 123 --fields Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.Effort=10

However, if you try to replace the field name with a variable in PowerShell like this

$fieldname = …

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 …

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is an open-source data query language developed by Facebook in 2012, which was then released as an open-source project in 2015. Unlike traditional RESTful APIs, which require specific endpoints for data retrieval, GraphQL adopts a different approach. Instead of fetching entire resources, …

Background

I recently wrote about the changes I had had to make to our Azure DevOps pipelines to address the changes required when code signing with a new DigiCert certificate due to new private key storage requirements for Code Signing certificates

Today I had to do the same for a GitHub Actions pipeline. The process …

This one of those posts that is more a note to self as I keep forgetting how to do this, but I hope it helps others.

Background

I use Microsoft’s Authenticator to provide MFA on a number of accounts. I recently swapped my Android phone and had to, after restoring a backup, re-authenticate some accounts on the …

The Try-Catch Pattern

Following the idea of defensive programming or as I like to call it for Logic Apps (being low code): defensive processing, it is considered good practice to wrap your workflows in a try-catch pattern to handle the unexpected. The pattern makes use of a mixture of Run After conditions and the Scope …

Overview

Prior to the Christmas break I was involved in writing some integrations that used a mixture of Logic Apps Standard and Function Apps. It was agreed as part of the architecture that user-assigned identities would be the best fit. As part of the implementation, I observed that the differences in configuration …

Background

It is becoming increasingly important to sign files digitally to ensure that they have not been tampered with, to secure the software supply chain. This is something we have done for a good while as a step in our Azure DevOps pipelines. However, recent(ish) changes in the way certificates are issued has …