The Issue Whilst migrating some Azure DevOps classic pipelines to templated multi-stage YAML, I hit a problem that a job running on a self-hosted agent would not start. The YAML stage, which required approval, would be queued and approved, but the agent would just sit there with the message Starting job but would never …

The Issue Whilst updating a client’s Duende Identity Server from versions 6 to 7, we experienced a problem. We followed the upgrade steps and all was working fine against our development instance i.e. the Identity Server Db was upgraded to the current schema and we could login from our test MVC web client without …

The Issue Within one of our Azure DevOps builds we today started to see the following error when running the SonarQube analysis step: ##[error][SQ] Task failed with status FAILED, Error message: Unrecoverable indexing failures: 1 errors among 1 requests. Check Elasticsearch logs for further details. Nothing obvious …

Background In past years, pre Covid, Black Marble hosted a venue for the Global DevOps Bootcamp, a community run in person hackathon event. After a short hiatus, I am pleased to be able to say this event has a successor, the Global DevOps Experience which is being run on the 15th of June at many venues around the …

The Issue We have a number of projects that use the old style SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) .RPTProj project format. These projects are not supported in Visual Studio 2022 out of the box, but there is an extension in the Marketplace that adds the functionality back so you can build them in the IDE. However, we …

Problem One of my client’s recently had a problem that a large number of Azure DevOps work items had been updated via Excel in error. They asked if there was a means to undo these edits. Unfortunately, a feature Azure DevOps does not provide. Solution So, I wrote a PowerShell script to do it. The script… …

Background Programmatic connection to Azure DevOps cannot be done with your Active Directory credentials. This is because this involves a dialog being shown, and these days usually an MFA check too. Historically, the solution to this problem was to enable Alternate Credentials, which could be passed as username and …

A History Lesson Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) has been around since 2005, since the first release of Team Foundation Server (TFS) in 2005. In 2013, over 10 years ago, Microsoft added Git support to TFS (later renamed as Azure DevOps), Git had already been around for 8 years at that point. 10 years is a long …

It is a major effort, often unfortunately ignored, keeping the dependencies in an open source project up to date. This was highlighted in Jesse Houwing's post on the state of the Azure DevOps Marketplace. Since reading this I have made much more of an effort to keep my Azure DevOps Extensions up to date. Dependabot …

The Issue We saw an issue with our SonarQube 10.3 Developer Edition (that is running as a Docker image hosted in Azure) when it was doing the analysis of a project that included Azure Bicep files. The Azure DevOps pipeline that triggered the SonarQube analysis was not failing, but within the SonarQube analysis step an …