Marcus Felling

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!

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

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?