Yesterday, yet again, I was thankful for my past self taking time to blog about a technical solution I had found. I had an error when trying to digitally sign a package. On searching on the error code I came across my own blog post with the solution. This was, as usual, one I had no recollection of writing. I find this …

I have been doing some work with Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipelines using stage dependency variables and conditions. They can get confusing quickly, you need one syntax in one place and another elsewhere. So, here are a few things I have learnt... What are stage dependency variables? Stage Dependencies are the way …

The Azure DevOps CLI provides plenty of commands to update Team Projects, but it does not cover all things you might want to set. A good example is setting branch policies. For a given repo you can set the policies using the Azure Repo command eg: 1az repos policy approver-count update --project <projectname> …

If in Azure DevOps you rename your Git Repo's default branch, say from 'master' to 'main', you will probably see an error in the form 'Encountered error(s) while parsing pipeline YAML: Could not get the latest source version for repository BlackMarble.NET.App hosted on Azure Repos using ref refs/heads/master.' when you …

Over the past couple of weeks, I have shipped three user-requested features for my Azure DevOps Release Notes Extension Generate multiple documents in a single run You can now specify multiple templates and output files. This allows a single instance of the task to generate multiple release note documents with …

The Issue Today I came across a strange issue with a reasonably old multi-stage YAML pipeline, it appeared to be cancelling itself. The Build stage ran OK, but the Release stage kept being shown as cancelled with a strange error. The strangest thing was it did not happen all the time. I guess this is the reason the …

The new GitHub Issues Beta is a big step forward in project management over what was previously possible with the old 'simple' form of Issues. The Beta adds many great features such as: Project Boards/Lists Actionable Tasks Custom Fields including Iterations Automation However, one thing that is not available out the …

This is another of those posts to remind me in the future. I searched the documentation for this answer for ages and found nothing, eventually getting the solution by asking on the SonarQube Forum When you link SonarQube into an Azure DevOps pipeline that is used from branch protection the success, or failure, of the …

This is a somewhat different post to my usual technical ones… In December 2017 I had major surgery. This was to remove an adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC) that had grown on one of my adrenal glands and then up my inferior vena cava (IVC) into my heart. Early on I decided, though not hiding the fact I was ill, to not …

Yesterday GitHub released Codespaces as a commercial offering. A new feature I have been using during its beta phase. Codespaces provides a means for developers to easily edit GitHub hosted repos in Visual Studio Code on a high-performance VM. No longer does the new developer on the team have to spend ages getting …