The Black Live Matter movement has engendered many conversations, hopefully starting changes for the good. Often these changes involve the use of language. One such change has been the move to stop using the name master and switching to the name main for the trunk/default branch in Git repos. This change is moving …

Azure DevOps YAML base pipelines allow the pipeline definitions to be treated like any other code. So you make changes in a branch and PR them into the main/trunk when they are approved. This works well if all the YAML files are in the same repo, but not so well if you are using YAML templates and the templated YAML is …

A question I am often asked when consulting on Azure DevOps is ‘how can I automatically create release notes and how can I publish them?’. Well it is for just this requirement that I have written a set of Azure DevOps Pipeline Tasks Release Note Generator - to generate release notes. I strongly recommend this …

The Issue I have an Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipeline that started giving the error The pipeline is not valid error: Unable to resolve latest version for pipeline templates: this could be due to inaccessible pipeline or no version is available and failing instantly. The Solution This is not the most helpful …

A common question I get when people are using my Release Notes task for Azure DevOps is whether it is possible to get the release notes as a PDF. In the past, the answer was that I did not know of any easy way. However, I have recently come across a command line tool by Max Melcher called AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport that …

Disks filling up on our private Azure DevOps agents is a constant battle. We have maintenance jobs setup on the agent pools, to clean out old build working folders nightly, but these don’t run often enough. We need a clean out more than once a day due to the number and size of our builds. To address this, with UI based …

During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift'ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work. Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively …

The Problem Whilst doing a migration from an on-premised TFS to Azure DevOps Services for a client I had a strange issue with SQLPackage.exe. I had previously completed the dry run of the migration without any issues and started the live migration with a fully defined process and timings for a each stage. When I came …

This is one of those blog posts I write to remind my future self how I fixed a problem. The Problem I have a release that installs VSTest and runs some integration tests that target .NET 4.6 x64. All these tests worked fine in Visual Studio. However, I got the following errors for all tests when they were run in a …

In the past I have documented the build and release process I use for my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions and also detailed how I have started to move the build phases to YAML. Well now I consider that multistage YAML pipelines are mature enough to allow me to do my whole release pipeline in YAML, hence this post. My …