Azure DevOps has had some serious issue over the past couple of weeks with availability here in Europe. A really good open and detailed root cause analysis has just been posted by the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. It also covers the mitigations they are putting place to make sure this same issues do not occur again. …

When I started creating OSS extensions for Azure DevOps Pipelines (starting on TFSPreview, then VSO, then VSTS and now named Azure DevOps) I made the mistake of putting all my extensions in a single GitHub repo. I thought this would make life easier, I was wrong, it should have been a repo per extension. I have …

Registration for the new season of Black Marble events have just been opened. If you can make it to Yorkshire why not come to an event (or two) Azure DevOps: So VSTS has Changed - 24 Oct 2018 Next Generation Business Productivity with Office 365 and Teams - 25 Oct 2018 Moving your Development Process to the Cloud with …

Whilst I was off work last week TFS 2018 Update 3 was released. As stated in the 2018.3 release notes this is the final bug fix update release of TFS 2018. The next major release of TFS will not be named TFS 2019 as you might have expected, but will use the new name of Azure DevOps Server. You can see the features …

The Azure DevOps (VSTS) team have published the promised postmortem on the outage on the 4th of September. It gives good detail on what actually happened to the South Central Azure Datacenter and how it effected VSTS (as it was then called). More interestingly it provides a discussion of mitigations they plan to put in …

Today Microsoft made a big announcement, VSTS is now Azure DevOps. The big change is they have split VSTS into 5 services you can use together or independently, including Azure Pipelines for CI/CD - free for open source and available in the GitHub CI marketplace. An important thing to note is that IT IS NOT JUST FOR …

The Problem The documentation for the VSTS WIKI suggests you can embed a video in a VSTS WIKI using the markdown/HTML``` Problem is that this does not seem to work, the MP4 just does not appear, you get an empty video player. However, if you swap to a full URL it does work e.g. 1 2### The Workaround 3 4The workaround …

When you want to register a build agent with VSTS, you use the VSTS instance’s URL and a user’s Personal Access Token (PAT). Whilst doing this today I connected to the VSTS instance OK but got the error "Agent pool not found".when I was asked to pick the agent pool to add the new agent to. As the user who’s …

You have always been able to customise your Team Projects in TFS, by editing a host of XML files, but it was not a pleasant experience. In VSTS a far more pleasant to use web based inherited customisation model was added, much to, I think, most administrators relief. If you used the TFS DB migration service you ended …

I have just rebuilt my first generation Surface Book from our company standard Windows image. These images are used by all our staff all the time without issue (on Surface and Lenovo devices), so I was not expecting any problems. I used to rebuild my PC every 6 months or so, but got out the habit when I moved to a …