I am automating the process by which we keep our build agent up to date. The basic process is to use a fork of the standard Microsoft Azure DevOps Pipeline agent that has the additional code included we need, notably Biztalk. Once I have the Packer created VM up and running, I need to install the agent. This is well …

The problem If you are like me for historic reasons you have multiple Azure DevOps organisations (instances) backed by the same Azure Active Directory (AAD). In my case for example: one was created when Azure DevOps was first released as TFSPreview.com and another is from our migration from on-prem TFS using the DB …

This is another of those posts I do so I don’t forget how I fixed something. I have a requirement to record videos for a client in 720p resolution. As I use as SurfaceBook with a High-Res screen I have found the best way to do this is set my Windows screen resolution to 1280x720 and do all my recording at this as …

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 …

The Problem The documentation for the VSTS WIKI suggests you can embed a video in a VSTS WIKI using the markdown/HTML``` Problem is that this does not seem to work, the MP4 just does not appear, you get an empty video player. However, if you swap to a full URL it does work e.g. 1 2### The Workaround 3 4The workaround …

When you want to register a build agent with VSTS, you use the VSTS instance’s URL and a user’s Personal Access Token (PAT). Whilst doing this today I connected to the VSTS instance OK but got the error "Agent pool not found".when I was asked to pick the agent pool to add the new agent to. As the user who’s …

I have just rebuilt my first generation Surface Book from our company standard Windows image. These images are used by all our staff all the time without issue (on Surface and Lenovo devices), so I was not expecting any problems. I used to rebuild my PC every 6 months or so, but got out the habit when I moved to a …

Updated 3 July 2018 - A colleague, Andy Davidson, suggested mRemoteNG as an alternative tool to this address this issue. mRemoteNG also has the advantage that it support most major remoting technologies not just RDP, so I am giving that a try for a while. This is one of those post I do mostly for myself so I don’t …

Whilst writing some training material for VSTS I hit a problem creating a TFVC workspace. I was using VS2017, linking a TFVC Repo to a local folder. I was connecting to the VSTS instance using an MSA. In Team Explorer, when I came to do a ‘Map & Get’ to map the source locations I got a ‘TF14061: The workspace …

I recently, whilst changing a CI/CD release pipeline, updated what was previously a private version of a VSTS extension in the VSTS Marketplace with a version of the VSIX package set to be public. Note, in my CI/CD process I have a private and public version of each extension (set of tasks), the former is used for …