Background

Our on premise build agents, though using the same image as the Microsoft hosted agents (generated using Packer, as I have previously posted about), have some extra setup done by Lability as they are deployed to a Hyper-V host.

Most of this is specific to the needs of running on Hyper-V e.g. setting up …

Background

We have for many years based our Azure DevOps build and release pipelines on on-premise agents. This was done to provide a means to scale up each agent using ‘bigger & faster’ local VMs then the Microsoft Hosted agents provided, and to utilise spare Hyper-V hosts we had after moving services …

Azure DevOps Server 2022.2 has recently been released. Unexpectedly this minor 2022.2 release includes a change in supported versions of SQL, SQL2017 support has been dropped. So, if someone attempted an upgrade from 2022.1 to 2022.2 they will get the error

“TF255146: The SQL Server instance you specified …

The Issue

Yesterday I posted about converting ARM output variables to Azure DevOps pipeline variables

Whilst using the pattern I discussed we hit an interesting problem. On my test pipeline I had the following YAML and it was working as expected.

- task: PowerShell@2
  displayName: Obtain Azure Deployment outputs …

The Issue

Historically, we have used Kees Schollaart’s ARM Outputs Azure DevOps task to convert the output from an ARM template deployment into a variable that can be used in a subsequent Azure DevOps pipeline task, using the general form

- task: AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3
  displayName: Deploy the …

Introduction

I have previously blogged a good deal on Azure DevOps variable evaluation, see here and here, but the saga continues…

When variables exist

Today I realised, something I guess should have been obvious, that when you manually queue a run, pre-defined variables such as $(Build.SourceBranchName) are not …

The Issue

Whilst working on an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline for a solution that used Git Submodules we hit a problem with the checkout of the repo and submodule using the YAML

jobs:
  - job: 'Build'
    steps:
    - checkout: self
        submodules: true

It got the main Git repo, but failed with the following …

The Issue

I recently upgraded a clients Azure DevOps server from 2019 to 2022. This required a new application tier VM due to the change in supported versions of Windows Server between the two versions.

Unfortunately, the client’s developers had always accessed the old Azure DevOps Server using the VMs FQDN, as …

The Issue

Last week I noticed that the staging URL that is normally output as a comment was missing from new GitHub PRs. Previously, this URL was added automatically by the Azure/static-web-apps-deploy GitHub Action for PRs in our Hugo based websites.

After a bit of digging, I noticed a warning message in the logs of …

Just a little reminder, probably to my future self, to not call your Azure DevOps YAML Deployment stage ‘deployment’.

If you forget you can expect to waste plenty of time, like we did last week, with environment agents not picking up queued jobs with no diagnostic logging messages to give you a clue as to …