Obscure error messages can be the bane of an IT professionals life, often hampering or even preventing outright any successful resolution of issues. An example of this happened to me recently, during what appeared to be a run-of-the-mill Azure SQL automated deployment.
We saw a few weeks ago how to utilise Azure Active Directory (AAD) Security Groups to manage Azure SQL database access at scale. When using this feature, you must ensure database changes are deployed out using an AAD administrator account or similar, a task which may be difficult to achieve in an Azure DevOps Pipeline.
Validating your Azure templates manually can be a challenging task to complete at scale. Fortunately, with the functionality available within Azure Pipelines, this entire process can be fully automated. This post will show you just how easy it is to implement automatic validation an deployment of your Azure templates within a CI process.
Working with variables within your Azure DevOps Pipeline can give you a high degree of latitude when planning your software deployments. When utilised as release variables, additional functionality is exposed, allowing you to alter the conditional flow within your pipeline dramatically. In this week's post, we'll find out how to use them in practice.
Getting your Azure Board backlog working correctly may require some tinkering, particularly if you decide to take advantage of certain features after you have begun using the application. In this post, I'll show you how to get the Team Board/Backlog configured to show work items from all sub-areas within your project.
Web application releases are a scary affair and, depending on the criticality of your system, you may need to put yourself in a position where changes, such as a SQL Server database upgrades, can be rolled back immediately. Fortunately, when using Azure DevOps, it's easier to do then you may think...
You ever had that feeling where you know something has worked successfully in the past, yet for some unexplainable reason, it suddenly decides not to? I had a recent example of this happening with a PowerShell script task in Azure DevOps which, in the end, had a pretty straightforward solution...
Towards the back end of last year, I discovered the joys and simplicity of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)/Azure DevOps. Regardless of what type of development workload that you face, the service provides a whole range of features that can speed up development, automate important build/release tasks and also assist with any testing workloads that you [...]
The introduction of Azure Data Factory V2 represents the most opportune moment for data integration specialists to start investing their time in the product. Version 1 (V1) of the tool, which I started taking a look at last year, missed a lot of critical functionality that - in most typical circumstances - I could do [...]
A vital part of any DevOps automation activity is to facilitate automatic builds of code projects on regular cycles. In larger teams, this becomes particularly desirable for a multitude of reasons: Provides a means of ensuring that builds do not contain any glaring code errors that prevent a successful compile from taking place. Enables builds [...]