Updated: 19 Jul 2023 - Revised the post to use Az CLI Task as opposed to a PowerShell Task Background Azure DevOps Pipelines have a built in mechanism to run maintenance jobs on a schedule. This is great for cleaning out old temporary data, but what if you want to run your own maintenance job? Writing a pipeline to run …

In a modern hybrid cloud world we have to accept constant change as the norm. You can't just build something and forget about it. You have to keep it up to date as newer tools/libraries appear. This is to at least address security issues, even if you don't want to adopt the new features. So I am expecting a degree of …

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 …

Over the past couple of weeks, I have shipped three user-requested features for my Azure DevOps Release Notes Extension Generate multiple documents in a single run You can now specify multiple templates and output files. This allows a single instance of the task to generate multiple release note documents with …

I have just release 3.46.4 of my Azure DevOps Cross-Platform release Notes task which adds support for generating release notes based on the results of Azure DevOps Test Plans. There has been support in the task for automated tests, run as part of the build or release process, for a while. However, until this release, …

With DevOps best practices and Microsoft’s DevOps tooling, Black Marble can deliver agile planning, source code control, package management, build, testing and release automation to continuously integrate, test, deliver and monitor your application. It is crucial to not only have the right people in place for your …

The testing cycle for Release Notes Templates can be slow, requiring a build and release cycle. To try to speed this process for users I have created a local test harness that allows the same calls to be made from a development machine as would be made within a build or release. However, running this is not as simple …