A major problem when moving from the graphic editing of Azure Pipeline builds to YAML has been the difficulty in knowing the options available, and of course making typos. Microsoft have just released a VSCode extension to help address this problem – it is called Azure Pipelines I have yet to give it a really good …

I have just release a new Azure DevOps Pipelines extension to update a page in a Git based WIKI. It has been tested again Azure DevOps WIKI – running as the build agent (so the same Team Project) Azure DevOps WIKI – using provided credentials (so any Team Project) GitHub – using provided credentials It takes a string …

Whilst listening to a recent Radio TFS it was mentioned that TFS Aggregator uses the C# SOAP based Azure DevOps APIs; hence needed a major re-write as these APIs are being deprecated. Did you know that there was a REST API alternative to TFS Aggregator? My Azure DevOps Services & Server Alerts DSL is out there, and …

There is a general move in Azure DevOps Pipelines to using YAML, as opposed to the designer, to define your pipelines. This is particularly enforced when using them via the new GitHub Marketplace Azure Pipelines method where YAML appears to be the only option. This has shown up a hole in my Pipeline Tasks …

When I started creating OSS extensions for Azure DevOps Pipelines (starting on TFSPreview, then VSO, then VSTS and now named Azure DevOps) I made the mistake of putting all my extensions in a single GitHub repo. I thought this would make life easier, I was wrong, it should have been a repo per extension. I have …

There are still a few spaces left at the Yorkshire Global DevOps BootCamp Venue hosted at Black Marble Come and learn about all things cool in DevOps, including Video keynote by Microsoft Local keynote: Breaking down the Monolith Hackathon/HandsOn DevOps challenges. The hands-on part with be based on a common …

Background I have a VSTS build extension that can apply a VSTS generated build number to Android APK packages. This takes a VSTS build number and generates, and applies, the Version Name (a string) and Version Code (an integer) to the APK file manifest. The default parameters mean that the behaviour of this task is to …

Background Having automated builds is essential to any good development process. Irrespective of the build engine in use, VSTS, Jenkins etc. you need to have a means to create the VMs that are running the builds. You can of course do this by hand, but in many ways you are just extending the old ‘it works on my PC – the …

I am really pleased that we at Black Marble are again the first UK location announcing that we are hosting an event on June 16th as part of the 2018 Global DevOps BootCamp. As the event’s site says… “The Global DevOps Bootcamp takes place once a year on venues all over the world. The more people joining in, the better …

I recently released an updated version of my Generate Parameters.XML tool for Visual Studio. This release adds support for generating parameters.xml files from app.config files as well as web.config files Why you might ask why add support for app.config files when the parameters.xml model is only part of WebDeploy? …