Background

When working with Azure DevOps, you may need to access the REST API if you wish to perform scripted tasks such as creating work items, or generating reports. Historically, you had to use a Personal Access Token (PAT) to do this.

If you look in my repo of useful Azure DevOps PowerShell scripts you will find …

Background

We use Lability to build Windows Server images for our test labs. Lability makes use of Desired State Configuration (DSC) to build the VM images. Part of this process is for Lability to download DSC modules, as ZIP files, from a NuGet feed such as PowerShell Gallery to inject into the created VM image. …

I make every effort keep all my Azure DevOps Pipeline extensions reliable as I know they are used by many people, but mistakes happen.

Yesterday I released an updated version of my ReleaseNotes task that introduced a bug if the pipeline produced no artifacts. I am pleased to say I have fixed the bug, and addressed this …

Background

At Black Marble we have our own private build agents, but they are built using the same Packer process as the Microsoft hosted ones. I recently rebuilt our agents to match the latest version of the hosted agents, and I ran into an issue with some .NET 3.1 based x86 MSTests. The tests were failing with the …

Background

I was recently trying to use PowerShelGet Install-Package to install a module from an Azure DevOps Artifacts hosted PowerShell Gallery using the following script

1# For authentication use a PAT as the password, UID can be anything
2$PATcreds = Get-Credential 
3Register-PSRepository -Name BM -SourceLocation …

Background

It is a really useful feature that you can expose Key Vault stored secrets as Azure DevOps pipeline variables via a variable group, but what happens when you do this? And what can you do if you try to expose too many variables?

I was recently working on a system where there was an increasing number of Key …

Background

I am using an Azure Function as backend for processing forms submissions from a Hugo static website, to process a simple contact form.

I wanted to add reCAPTCHA support, as the site was generating too many spam emails. I also wanted to show a different confirmation pages depending on whether the reCAPTCHA …

Problem

After deploying a dotnet 6 console app to a production server, I got the following error:

Exception: [Could not load file or assembly 'System.Data.Odbc, Version=6.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51'. The system cannot find the file specified.]

The strange thing was the same EXE, built on a …

The Problem

I recently did our regular update of our Azure DevOps Private build agents. It is rare we see problems when we do this, but this time one of our very regularly run builds started to fail when running unit tests.

We had not changed the project source code, all the test ran locally in Visual Studio. We had …