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 …

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 …

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 …