I recently hit a problem with builds triggered by branch policies in Azure DevOps Repos. With the help of Microsoft I found out the problem and I thought it worth writing up uncase others hit the issue. Setup Folders Assume you have a Git repo with source for the UI, backend Services and common code in sub folders / …

Introduction I use Azure DevOps Pipelines for the build and release of my Azure DevOps Pipeline extensions, I previously detailed my process here . For a good few months now YAML builds have been available. These provide the key advantage that the build is defined in a YAML text file that is stored with your product’s …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Azure DevOps has had some serious issue over the past couple of weeks with availability here in Europe. A really good open and detailed root cause analysis has just been posted by the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. It also covers the mitigations they are putting place to make sure this same issues do not occur again. …

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 …

Whilst I was off work last week TFS 2018 Update 3 was released. As stated in the 2018.3 release notes this is the final bug fix update release of TFS 2018. The next major release of TFS will not be named TFS 2019 as you might have expected, but will use the new name of Azure DevOps Server. You can see the features …