Background We regularly re-build our Azure DevOps private agents using Packer and Lability, as I have posted about before. Since the latest re-build, we have seen all sorts of problems. All related to pulling packages and tools from NuGet based repositories. Problems we have never seen with any previous generation of …

As I am sure you are all aware the preview of Visual Studio 2022 has just dropped, so it is time for me to update my Parameter.xml Generator Tool to support this new version of Visual Studio. But what does my extension do? As the Marketplace description says... A tool to generate parameters.xml files for MSdeploy from …

Creating a new project in Azure DevOps with your desired process template is straightforward. However, it is only the start of the job for most administrators. They will commonly want to set up other configuration settings such as branch protection rules, default pipelines etc. before giving the team access to the …

I recently had the need to get the email address of the approver of a deployment to an environment from within a multi-stage YAML pipeline. Turns out it was not as easy as I might have hoped given the available documented APIs. Background My YAML pipeline included a manual approval to allow deployment to a given …

Another post so I don't forget how I fixed a problem.... I have been making sure some Selenium UX tests that were originally written against Chrome also work with other browsers. I have had a few problems, the browser under test failing to load or Selenium not being able to find elements. Turns out the solution is to …

Update 10 May 2021 - Remember that GitHub Issue Forms are in early beta, you need to keep an eye on the regular new releases as they come out. For example, my GitHub Forms stopped showing last week. This was due to me using now deprecate lines in the YAML definition files. Once I edited the files to update to support …

It is easy to get your local branches in Git out of sync with the upstream repository, leaving old dead branches locally that you can't remember creating. You can use the prune option on your Git Fetch command to remove the remote branch references, but that command does nothing to remove local branches. A good while …

I have just release 3.46.4 of my Azure DevOps Cross-Platform release Notes task which adds support for generating release notes based on the results of Azure DevOps Test Plans. There has been support in the task for automated tests, run as part of the build or release process, for a while. However, until this release, …

I have spent too long today trying to track down an intermittent “SQLite Error 5: 'database is locked'” error in .Net Core Entity Framework. I have read plenty of documentation and even tried swapping to use SQL Server, as opposed to SQLite, but this just resulted in the error ‘There is already an open DataReader …

There are good reasons why you might wish to move an existing Azure DevOps organisation from one region to another. The most common ones are probably: A new Azure DevOps region has become available since you created your organisation that is a 'better home' for your projects. New or changing national regulations …