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> …

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 …

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 …