What Gets Measure Gets Done: The Dangers of Checks and Balances

Hello! Let’s start with a story: I’m extending into my house’s loft space to create an extra few rooms, and make better use of a space that until recently stored Christmas decorations. This is a major piece of work; we’re changing the skyline of our house, and in the UK this kind of thing requires Planning Permission from the Local Authority. Planning Permissions requires submission of forms and drawings to enusre that the building is safe.

2023-08-01

Build and Publish VS Code Themes From Azure DevOps

Hello! Let’s not mince words: automating builds/releases/deployments makes development an awful lot simpler. All of the VS Code theme repos have the same yaml pipeline to publish them to the Visual Studio Gallery. Once you have gone through the process of setting up a publisher in the Visual Studio Gallery it’s straightforward to automate publishing packages. In the code below you’ll see that there is a variable called $(POSTMAN) (no, idk why I called it this either), which is a PAT created specficially for publishing.

2023-07-24

New Visual Studio Code Theme, and It's So Fetch

Hello! I’m on holiday right now, and what better way to relax than to create a new theme for VS Code! Clearly I need to add screenshots and update the readme to make it pertinent. I genuinely enjoy making new themes; something different to focus on that doesn’t mean much as I’ll be the only one to use these themes, but fun nonetheless. This one is a light theme with mainly green as the accent.

2023-07-19

Display Custom Build Number in Azure DevOps Environments

Hello! I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how to get the Build Number to display in the environments status information in Azure DevOps. Environments use the Build Number to show which pipeline was last deployed. And so there is a distinction between a build number, which can include info like app name and branch name, and the semver number, which can be included with the build number. However the semver can be used when publishing artefacts from a pipeline, which doesn’t need all the info included in the build number: PowerShellGallery has strict versioning rules, and I don’t know about Pypi, but the convention is to use semantic versioning.

2023-07-10

Managing ADF Trigger Runtime State From Source Control

Hello! In a previous post, I wrote about how the runtime state of ADF triggers is ignored even if it is set in the ARM template. This means we have a couple of options when manging runtime state acorss different deployments of the same ADF. The first one is to use the UI of the ADF to set the trigger state. Even as someone who is quite vociferous against using UI’s to manage configuration, I think this is far from the worst idea.

2023-07-06

ARM Template for ADF Trigger Runtime State is Always Ignored

Hello! So, continuing the saga of deploying the ARM templates of ADFs that are generated by the npm package made avilable by Microsoft, I came across something that I was not aware of, and honestly I really should have been. Although runtimestate can be included in an ARM Template to deploy a Trigger, the runtimestate on the deployed ADF will not be altered to match what is in the ARM template.

2023-07-05

Check for Failed ADF Linked Template Deployments in Azure DevOps

Hello! This series on ADF deployment management seems to be never ending and always evolving. In a previous post I shared some code that could be added to an Azure DevOps pipelines that would check for failed deployment messages. This was necessary as typically we’d not get a useful error back, and in some environments we did not have access to the Resource Group to check for deployment errors. Now that we have moved to making deployments using linked templates for ADF this code is no longer helpful, as it returns the same top error: each linked template has its own entry in the Deployment registry.

2023-06-23

PR Raised To Update PrePostDeploymentScript.Ver2.ps1

Hello! I’ve spent the day parallelising the entire PrePostDeploymentScript.Ver2.ps1, as well as merely the deleting deployments. I’ve also fixed a casing issue where the parameters file was not being found on the ubuntu-latest Azure DevOps Agent. This is the link for the Pull Request, and this is the link for the copy of the file in my forked repo. I have no idea if the changes will be accepted or not, but hopefully it will as it’s a good script it just needs a few tweaks to it.

2023-06-20

Parallelising Delete Linked Templates

Hello! The saga continues with deleting deployments for linked templates… come to find out that deleting linked templates serially can be extremely slow. So I updated my script to parallelise the deletion of the templates. Fortunately ForEach-Object has a parallel feature and can throttle the number of threads. It’s quite neat that each deplyoyment has all the info in it so the script block is able to reference the object for all it needs.

2023-06-19

More Woes with ADF Deployments

Hello! In a previous post, I wrote about some of the issues with the PowerShell script used to delete deployments. This is packaged as part of the npm package provided by Microsoft. We recently hit an issue with the number of resources in the ARM template generated by this npm package. Helpfully the package also creates the ARM templates as linkedtemplates. This was all fine, however the delete deployments section of this ill-fated PowerSHell script does not account for multiple deployments, which is exactly what happens when you use linked templates.

2023-06-17