Marcus Felling

I’ve been a long time user of Azure Pipelines. It’s a very mature and powerful platform, that integrates really well with other parts of the Azure DevOps suite, to provide end-to-end traceability of the software development lifecycle. However, Microsoft is investing heavily in GitHub which now has some very appealing capabilities: source code security, development insights and analytics, open source and innersource management, etc. As these new capabilities get built out in GitHub, I’d like to explore what is takes to move things over. In this post I’ll be documenting what is takes to port one of my existing Azure Pipelines (YAML) to GitHub Actions.

Continue reading Porting an Azure Pipeline (YAML) to a GitHub Action

The size of your TFS/Azure DevOps Server collection databases will grow over time, and it’s not a trivial task figuring out how to cleanup. This conversation usually begins in preparation for an upgrade or migration to Azure DevOps Services. I have some general steps you can take to begin these efforts.

Continue reading How to reduce the size of your TFS/Azure DevOps Server collection databases

I’ve seen it too many times. It all starts when somebody is given access to a new “production” Azure subscription that’s pay-as-you-go. A new resource is created for the first time on a Friday, running up costs over the weekend, resulting in a surprisingly large bill. The cloud is too expensive!

Continue reading Tips for governing Azure subscriptions

I often get asked, “why can’t I update any of the fields on the Associated Automation tab of a Test Case?”

Continue reading Associating automated tests with Azure Test Cases

Governance around CI/CD pipelines can be challenging. As the number of your applications and pipelines grow, it’s tough to make sure everybody is playing by the rules. Pipeline decorators can help us with this by injecting mandatory steps to the beginning and/or end of each pipeline.

Continue reading Azure DevOps Pipeline Decorators

If you’re working with Azure DevOps Pipelines, you should be aware of all your options when it comes to using variables. They make it possible to “Build Once, Deploy Anywhere”, prevent code-reuse, and build scale-able CI/CD pipelines.

Continue reading Azure DevOps Pipelines: Variables, $Variables, __Variables__, $env:Variables, $(Variables), %VARIABLES%

Today I discovered the Start-IISCommitDelay and Stop-IISCommitDelay cmdlets available in the IISAdministration module. In the past I’ve randomly encountered errors when issuing back to back commands that modify the applicationHost.config file:

Filename: \\?\C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config
Error: Cannot write configuration file

Continue reading Start-IISCommitDelay / Stop-IISCommitDelay

When I recently heard the announcement for Public Preview of PowerShell in Azure Functions 2.x, I was excited to give it a test drive. One of the first use cases I thought of was using this for custom scripts that run on a build server. For example, a PowerShell script that generates some sort of report and emails users with the results. Rather than running this on a build server, we can use Azure Functions to reap some of the benefits of serverless. In this post I’ll walk through setting up an Azure Function that’s triggered by an Azure Pipelines release definition via HTTP.

Continue reading Trigger an Azure Function (PowerShell) from an Azure DevOps Pipeline

If you’re attempting to update a sprawling amount of release definitions, clicking through each definition using the visual designer can be a real chore. That’s why Task Groups really come in handy…But if you’re already stuck with a bunch of definitions that don’t utilize task groups, you’ll probably want to turn to the REST API using PowerShell.

Continue reading Bulk update Azure Release Pipelines tasks