Hello!

I’m somewhat short on time wrt writing new blog posts. I have a long post in the making, and I have some Thoughts on Things, so I’m jotting down some bulletins in the guise of a blog post in the effort of keeping some momentum going. This year looks like it’ll be the least productive year in terms of number of blog posts, but I’ve been pretty busy behind the scenes both here and on random GiHub projects, helping organise SQL Supper meetups, helping and attending Hackathons, and just generally working and finding time to do fun things, like spending time with my family, running and of course play Pokémon.

This post was scheduled to go live on The Boy’s 3rd Birthday. A LOT has happened between now and then, including another baby, who is now walking. And yet I can hardly believe that the time really has flown by that quickly. But thanks to More Things, this post only just eeks it into September, keeping my momentum of one post permonth just about intact.

VSTS Become Azure DevOps

In the most controversial name change since Marathon became Snickers, Microsoft have decided to do away with the moniker Visual Studio Team Services and replace it with Azure DevOps. Much wailing and nashing of teeth was heard throughout the Twittersphere, including my own, but inevitably we’ll all have to get on with it and start referring to it as that. Of course you still log on to “[teamname].visualstudio.com” and you can use “dev.azure.com/[teamname]”, and that Visual Studio url ain’t going anywhere any time soon as too many API’s rely on it existing. FWIW I’m not sure the name change is a positive step, as it once again enforces the idea that DevOps is a tool, or a team, as opposed to a way of working. It’s also not exclusively not an Azure thing, so an odd branding choice there, irrespective of how strong a brand may be.

Call for Lightning Talks at November’s SQL Supper

James Duggan and I have been helping with SQL Supper for the past year or so, and one of the things we’d really like to do is get more speakers talking about their experiences with a particular technology. But whilst many people have shown interest in speaking, few have followed up on it, and I can completely understand why: it’s intimidating to stand up in front of a group of peers and talk uninterrupted for any length of time. And at user groups it tends to be for 30-60 minutes. That’s also a lot of content to create. So for November’s meetup we’re looking for people to stand up and speak for 5 minutes about any technology they’ve been working on. In some respects 5 minutes worth of content is harder than 30 minutes because you have to condense your entire experience into a much shorter space of time, so it’s a harder story to tell. But at any rate, if you’re in the London area in November and have always wanted to have a go at speaking without having to commit too much time to create a full talk, or stand up for such a long time on your own, here is your chance!

DBOps Project

Now for those of you that don’t know I was the person what wrote the Publish-DbaDacPackage Functions in dbatools. And I’m very glad I did as the sqlcollaborative team are an awesome bunch with more than just dbatools. And one of the projects that was pointed in my direction is the DBOps project. So I’ve spent a couple of days looking over it, and though I’m an SSDT guy, I cna certianly see value in the project: I recently spoke to one of my old bosses who used to use SSDT and they migrated over to DBUp, whihc DBOps makes use of, as they so rarley upgraded their database the migration approach seemed a better fit. The chap running DBOps is also open to suggestions nand took on board my idea that DBOps creates the database if it doesn’t exist, which is a feature in DBUp. So all good.

PoshSSDTBuildDeploy Gets a Minor Upgrade

In fact it’s had two minor upgrades: the first one is a bug fix to resolve the path of the working folder that is passed in for the functions. The second minor upgrade is you can now pass in the path to NuGet. The actual issue on GitHub is to use NuGet if it is in the path. But I’m struggling with getting this working in a non-flaky way, so it’s going to require a bit more thought and perhaps a chat with a few people I know to make it less flaky. Oh, and I got the tests running on the build again. Mainly by making my desktop the build agent. So when I say it works on my machine, you can be sure of it. For all this goodness then version 2.0.389 is your boy!

MSIgnite Happened

I’m not going to pretend that I’m excited about what’s coming. I think I’m suffering from Marketing Fatigue. I’m sure someone somewhere who is immune to this kind of thing will provide a more detailed and less jaded review of MSIgnite though.