The Problem Due to recent changes at NIST and the way they host the NVD DB the dependency-check/DependencyCheck tool that underpins the Azure DevOps OWASP Dependency Check is struggling to download the vulnerabilities DB. This is all discussed in this support thread. The root cause of the problems is a mixture of many …

The Problem I have posted in the past about caching the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) used by Jeremy Long’s DependencyCheck tool via the associated Azure DevOps task. Today I had an issue that on one pipeline the Azure DevOps task was reporting the following error Starting: Dependency Check …

The Problem I recently came across a problem with a complex BitTalk solution being built in an Azure DevOps Pipeline. It had been working fine, but it started to fail with error related to failing to copy built DLLs from the obj folder to the bin folder because it said the files were in use by MSBuild. The Analysis I …

Whilst at DDD South West I did a very enjoyable panel podcast recording for Dan Clarke’s Unhandled Exception podcast on the subject of the impact of AI on software development. I am please to say that the recording of the panel has just been published. So why not have a listen to it, or any of Dan’s back catalog For …

Thanks to everyone who came to my session ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?` at yesterday’s DDD South West. I don’t believe there is a recording of this session from any event where I have delivered it, but you can find a copy of my slides, with all my other presentations, in the repo …

Background I have posted in the past on how we manage Azure DevOps Pipeline Agents with Packer and Lability. Whilst deploying a new agent I hit a interesting problem, the issue was completely a ‘UTS’ (user too stupid) error, but the way it was surfaced was I think interesting. The Problem My script built and deployed a …

Background My post-op chemotherapy treatment for my adrenal cancer meant I was struggling to get any fitness, so in 2019 I bought a Ribble CGR-ALe ebike based around the Mahle X35 system. It was in fact pre-ordered prior to the bike’s initial release by Ribble. This bike served me well, getting me out and about before …

Background We have a few non-critical systems running as single instance Docker containers hosted on Azure WebApps. On these systems we have started to see the warning Your app is configured with Docker Compose, which is set to retire on March 31, 2027. For multi-container support, please update your app to support …

The Problem I recently had a customer who’s Azure DevOps Pipelines BizTalk 2020 build had suddenly started to fail. They said they had not altered their BizTalk solution, or their build process. The Analysis Turns out the issue was that the operating system on the VM that hosts their self-hosted Azure DevOps agent had …

The Problem Today I was upgrading our self hosted Delinea Secret Server from 11.9.x to 12.0.x. These upgrades are usually an easy process, all achieved within the Secret Server web UI, but not today. The upgrade proceeded as normal, downloading the new package, updating the DB schema and updating the binaries, but then …