“You need a license to touch that!”. The case for licensing of individuals within the software engineering profession.

Background

Back in 2004 I completed my BSc Degree in Computer Science at Bradford University; only 20 years after I started. My year in industry got out of hand!

One module I did involved me writing a …

The Problem

I am getting back out in front of audiences again as opposed to doing Teams/Zoom events. So I dug out my trusty Logitech Spotlight presentation remote from the bag where it had been sitting for well over a year. However, there was a problem, it would not pair with my re-built Windows 11 PC. It could not …

I have recently been working with a client who needed to move Azure DevOps Work Items between Team Projects on different Azure DevOps instances. The only realistic choice was to use the free open source Azure DevOps Migration Tools.

I have used these tools before, but it was a while ago, and as it is under active …

Problem

I recently had a strange problem. I had an existing Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline that used the checkout task to do a deep Git fetch of a repo and it's submodules. The reason for the deep fetch was that later in the pipeline we ran GitVersion and this needs the whole repo to be able to calculate the version.

 1- …

At Black Marble, we have had a long standing Azure DevOps Team Project that we used for end-to-end demos of the principles of DevOps called Living the Dream. This used a legacy codebase, the old Microsoft Fabrikam demo, and showed that can be deployed using modern tools.

As I had no similar demo for GitHub Enterprise, …

Today at Microsoft's Ignite Conference there have been some very interesting announcements related to Azure DevOps and GitHub.

In the recent past, I have seen confusion from our clients as to what is Microsoft's recommended DevOps solution, given they have both Azure DevOps and GitHub.

It is true that Microsoft have …

The OWASP Dependency Checker can be used to check for known vulnerabilities in a variety of eco-systems. This tool produces a HTML based report, but I wanted to expose the issues in SonarCloud. The problem is that SonarCloud does not allow ingestion of OWASP Dependency Checker vulnerabilities out the box.

However, …

In the past I have written most of my Azure DevOps scripts calling the Azure DevOps REST API from PowerShell. This has worked, but did involve a lot of JSON payload handling.

A better option these days is to look at the AZ CLI and specifically the azure-devops extension, as this does much of the heavy lifting for you. …