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 …

The Problem I have blogged previously about moving various web sites over to become Hugo Static Sites. Recently one of my site's, one using the tailwindscss module, GitHub Build and Deployment Workflow started failing with the following error: 1Start building sites … 2hugo …

Background It is easy to create an Open Source Project and leave it to gather technical debt as the libraries it depends upon are updated. I have tried to keep on top of updating all my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, and I have to say Dependabot has certainly helped, but I have not been as diligent as I might have …

The Problem I am getting back out in front of audiences again as opposed to doing Teams/Zoom events. So I dug out my trusty Logitech Spotlight presentation remote from the bag where it had been sitting for well over a year. However, there was a problem, it would not pair with my re-built Windows 11 PC. It could not …

I have recently been working with a client who needed to move Azure DevOps Work Items between Team Projects on different Azure DevOps instances. The only realistic choice was to use the free open source Azure DevOps Migration Tools. I have used these tools before, but it was a while ago, and as it is under active …