The Problem I have been using Packer to generate our Azure DevOps Build agent disk images for a while now. The advantage of this process is that our Azure DevOps self-hosted agents have the same installed software, and hence capabilities, as the Microsoft hosted ones. So it is trival to move a build pipeline from …

Whilst presenting on ‘Migrating DevOps Toolsets’ at DDDNorth 2026 last weekend, I mentioned a blog post & flowchart I had created a few years ago to guide people through their options when migrating from what was then called TFS (Azure DevOps Server) to what was then called VSTS (Azure DevOps Services) When I got home, …

Background I have been doing the regular maintenance in our Azure DevOps Pipelines of updating the versions of tasks. This usually means you perform one of the following actions Just increment the major version number in the YAML e.g task: MyTask@1 to task: MyTask@2 when there is a newer version of a task available. If …

I have posted in the past about the issues a misconfigured cache can have in Azure DevOps Pipelines, or GitHub Actions. Well it caught me out again today, wasting a few hours of my time. Today, I had a failing integration test in a CI/CD pipeline, but all the tests passed locally. The failing test was looking for a …

The Issue I recently had an issue trying to add a new Azure DevOps Pipeline Agent Pool to an existing Azure DevOps 2022 Server via the Team Project Collection Settings UI. When tried to add the agent pool I got the error Access denied needs Manage permissions to perform this action. For more information, contact the …

The Issue I have been chasing what it turned out to be a non-existent fault when trying to ingest test code coverage data into our SonarQube instance. I saw my ‘problem’ in a .NET 8.0 solution with XUnit v3 based unit tests, this solution was being built using this Azure DevOps Pipelines YAML

• task: SonarQubePrepare@7 …

The Issue I have some long standing PowerBI reports that I use for summarizing project data. They use a variety of data sources, including Azure hosted SQL instances. I recently moved the Azure hosted SQL databases to a new instance as part of a major tidy up of my Azure resources. This of course caused my reports to …

The Issue We have used SonarQube and the OWASP Dependency Checker Plugin for many years to perform analysis and vulnerability checking within our Azure DevOps Pipelines. Recently, whilst picking up an old project for a new phase of development, I came across a couple of problems due to changes in both tools since the …

Another podcast I recently recorded with our friends at Grey Matter has just been published Secure by design: The DevSecOps mindset For the original version of this post see Richard Fennell's personal blog at Grey Matter Podcast 'Secure by design: The DevSecOps mindset'

I recently came across an interesting side effect with the Azure DevOps cache task if its settings are not correctly configured. One that caused me to get somewhat confused before I realised what had occurred. The Problem I had a working pipeline that as part of its build process ran the OWASP Dependency Checker task. …