Marcus Felling

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.

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.

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

I recently setup a new SonarQube instance to perform static code analysis as part of CI builds. In this post I’d like to document what I learned to hopefully make it easier for you (I assume that’s why you’re reading this).

Continue reading Setting up SonarQube (on Windows) with Azure Pipelines

The filtering options on the release pipeline dashboard leave a lot to be desired. As the number of definitions and releases grow, it gets harder and harder to have overall visibility across releases. Currently there isn’t a great reporting solution that can be used to gather such info.

Continue reading Azure Release Pipelines: What releases haven’t been deployed to Production yet?

In the past, I’ve used the method of placing a app_offline.htm file at the root of an IIS website to throw up a maintenance page. This has been available since ASP.NET 2.0 / 3.5. Lately I’ve got used to deploying sites with no downtime approaches, such as rolling and blue/green. I had forgot about app_offline.htm when I recently set up deployment pipelines for some ASP.NET Core sites.

Continue reading Deploying IIS hosted ASP.NET Core apps using app_offline.htm

I recently had to come up with a solution to perform a bulk deploy of all apps to an environment using the latest build artifacts. I wanted to use a “wrapper” release definition to orchestrate all of the deployments; similar to how Octopus Deploy’s “Deploy Release Step” works.

However, TFS Release Management currently lacks functionality to create releases from within a build or release definition. There are 3rd party extensions to queue/trigger other builds within a build definition, but nothing to create releases.

Continue reading TFS Release Management: Create Release via REST API

The new TFS/Azure Pipelines build and release tasks to run functional tests make setting up a CI pipeline pretty dang easy. The VSTest task can now run unit tests AND functional tests. Microsoft deprecated the “Run Functional Tests” task in favor of consolidating all things test related. In this post I will outline the steps to: trigger a CI build that builds and packages your functional test project, executes the tests, then provides test run results. This will be fairly high level and I’m going to assume you already know the basics of installing agents and creating build/release definitions.
Continue reading Setting up a CI pipeline to run functional tests in TFS 2018 and Azure Pipelines (Formerly VSTS)