Updated 30-Oct-2025 Added more details on Screen Refresh Rate and Teams Room App

The Problem

We have owned a Surface Hub v1 for a number of years, and it has served us well. However, with Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 it was in danger of becoming a large piece of sculpture in the office. This is not just …

The Issue

I have previously posted about settings up Snipe IT on Azure using a Docker container running in an Azure WebApp with a MySQL DB.

I recently had to revisit my setup as the site was failing to load with a DB connection failure. The issue was that the SSL certificate chain used by Microsoft for their hosted …

Introduction

The recent addition to Azure DevOps of the StringList parameter type can be really useful to dynamically create parallel stages or jobs in an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline.

A StringList parameter can be used to present a list of values to the user queuing a pipeline run, thus allowing the selection of one or …

A while ago I posted about starting to use Home Assistant. This has been working well for monitoring our SolarEdge PV and Battery system, controlling if we should charge the battery with cheap overnight power if there has not been enough sun to fully charge the battery.

Bitten by the Home Assistant bug, I decided I …

Note that this is a repost of my LinkedIn article of the same name

The changing face of DevOps

Over the years the style of DevOps consultancy I have done has changed, along with its name. Changing from the simple ‘source control’, to SDLC, then ALM to now DevOps.

Back in the days of Team Foundation Server …

I have recently done a couple of streamable events with our friends at Grey Matter. Both are now available to enjoy on demand:

• Grey Matter Talks Tech podcast ‘Inside GitHub: The Platform Powering Open Sources
• Grey Matter’s on-demand Webinar ‘Inside the Developer’s Toolkit’ with JetBrains …

The Problem

I recently rebuild my trusty Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop. As you usually find, a fresh install of Windows 11 meant a leap in performance.

All was good for a couple of weeks, until I started to get problems. It still was working to supply power and the HDMI connection to my external monitor worked, but the USB …

The Problem

The GitHub ‘Azure Pipelines’ App enables some really interesting ‘better together’ scenarios mixing the usage of Azure DevOps Pipelines for CI/CD processes while your source is stored on GitHub. It is particularly useful if an enterprise is migrating towards GitHub Enterprise over a …

The Issue

In Azure DevOps Pipelines there is a feature to dynamically configure the build number e.g. at the top of a YAML build add the following to get a version in the form 1.2.25123.1

name: $(major).$(minor).$(year:YY)$(dayofyear).$(rev:r)

• Major & Minor are user created and managed variables
• Year, Dayofyear …

Introduction

Over the years, I have been involved in numerous migrations of TFS/Azure DevOps Server from on-premises servers to the cloud hosted Azure DevOps Services using the Microsoft Azure DevOps Data Migration Tool. As long as you carefully followed the instructions, the process was relatively straightforward.

I …