A question I am often asked when consulting on Azure DevOps is ‘how can I automatically create release notes and how can I publish them?’. Well it is for just this requirement that I have written a set of Azure DevOps Pipeline Tasks Release Note Generator - to generate release notes. I strongly recommend this …

The Issue I have an Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipeline that started giving the error The pipeline is not valid error: Unable to resolve latest version for pipeline templates: this could be due to inaccessible pipeline or no version is available and failing instantly. The Solution This is not the most helpful …

A common question I get when people are using my Release Notes task for Azure DevOps is whether it is possible to get the release notes as a PDF. In the past, the answer was that I did not know of any easy way. However, I have recently come across a command line tool by Max Melcher called AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport that …

Disks filling up on our private Azure DevOps agents is a constant battle. We have maintenance jobs setup on the agent pools, to clean out old build working folders nightly, but these don’t run often enough. We need a clean out more than once a day due to the number and size of our builds. To address this, with UI based …

During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift'ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work. Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively …

I have just released Version 3.1.7 of my Azure DevOps Pipeline XplatGenerateReleaseNotes Extension. This new version allows you to build release notes within a Multi-Stage YAML build since the last successful release to the current (or named) stage in the pipeline as opposed to just last fully successful build. This …

The Problem Whilst doing a migration from an on-premised TFS to Azure DevOps Services for a client I had a strange issue with SQLPackage.exe. I had previously completed the dry run of the migration without any issues and started the live migration with a fully defined process and timings for a each stage. When I came …

Updated 30/Sep/21 to reflect changes in the Aggregator CLI setup process Updated 27/Mar/22 to fix broken links Background Back in the day I wrote a tool, TFS Alerts DSL, to do Work Item roll-up for TFS. Overtime I updated this to support VSTS (as Azure DevOps was then called), it’s final version is still available in …

The testing cycle for Release Notes Templates can be slow, requiring a build and release cycle. To try to speed this process for users I have created a local test harness that allows the same calls to be made from a development machine as would be made within a build or release. However, running this is not as simple …

I have added another new feature to my Cross Platform release note generator. Now, when using Handlebars based templates you can optionally get the parent or child work items for any work item associated with build/release To enable the feature, as it is off by default, you need to set the getParentsAndChildren: true …