Announcing the deprecation of my Azure DevOps Pester Extension as it has been migrated to the Pester Project and republished under a new ID

Back in early 2016 I wrote an Azure DevOps Extension to wrapper Pester, the Powershell unit testing tool. Over the years I updated it, and then passed the support of it over to someone who knows much more about Powershell and Pester than I Chris Gardner who continued to develop it.

With the advent of cross-platform Powershell Core we realized that the current extension implementation had a fundamental limitation. Azure DevOps Tasks can only be executed by the agent using the Windows version of Powershell or Node. There is no option for execution by Powershell Core, and probably never will be. As Pester is now supported by Powershell Core this was a serious limitation.

To get around this problem I wrote a Node wrapper to allow the existing Powershell task to be executed using Node, by running a Node script then shelling out to Powershell or Powershell Core. A technique I have since used to make other extensions of mine cross-platform

Around this time we started to discuss whether my GitHub repo was really the best home for this Pester extension, and in the decided that this major update to provide cross-platform support was a good point to move it a new home under the ownership of Pester Project.

So, given all that history, I am really pleased to say that I am deprecating my Pester Extension and adding instructions that though my extension is not going away and will continue to work as it currently does, it will not be updated again and all users should consider swapping over to the new cross-platform version of the extension that is the next generation of same code base but now owned and maintained by the Pester project (well still Chris in reality).

Unfortunately, Azure DevOps provides no way to migrate ownership of an extension. So to swap to the new version will require some work. If you are using YAML the conversion is only a case of changing the task name/id. If you are using the UI based builds or release you need to add the new task and do some copy typing of parameters. The good news is that all the parameter options remain the same so it should be a quick job.

Also please note that any outstanding issues, not fixed in the new release, have been migrated over to the extensions now home, they have not been forgotten.

So hope you all like the new enhanced version of the Pester Extension and thanks to Chris for sorting the migration and all his work support it.