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 …

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 …

Late last year at (DDDNorth](https://twitter.com/dddnorth) my session had the title 'Why don't people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?'. Between anecdotes, a key theme was tha people too often don't make sensible diagnostic steps. A problem caused, in my opinion, by the fact they have not been exposed …

“You need a license to touch that!”. The case for licensing of individuals within the software engineering profession. Background Back in 2004 I completed my BSc Degree in Computer Science at Bradford University; only 20 years after I started. My year in industry got out of hand! One module I did involved me writing a …

Today at Microsoft's Ignite Conference there have been some very interesting announcements related to Azure DevOps and GitHub. In the recent past, I have seen confusion from our clients as to what is Microsoft's recommended DevOps solution, given they have both Azure DevOps and GitHub. It is true that Microsoft have …

The contents of this book is not at all what I was expecting from the title ‘Accelerate DevOps with GitHub’. Usually books that aim to provide up to date walkthroughs for a specific current tools tend to not place them within the large tapestry of the ecosystem. This is not the case with this book from Michael …

Yesterday, yet again, I was thankful for my past self taking time to blog about a technical solution I had found. I had an error when trying to digitally sign a package. On searching on the error code I came across my own blog post with the solution. This was, as usual, one I had no recollection of writing. I find this …

This is a somewhat different post to my usual technical ones… In December 2017 I had major surgery. This was to remove an adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC) that had grown on one of my adrenal glands and then up my inferior vena cava (IVC) into my heart. Early on I decided, though not hiding the fact I was ill, to not …

In the past I have blog on the subject of using advanced unit test mocking tools to ‘mock the unmockable’. It is an interesting question to revisit; how important today are units tests where this form of complex mocking is required? Of late I have certainly seen a bit of a move towards using more functional style …