Azure DevOps Server Cookbook 2019 for $10 all of september!

Tarun Arora on Sep 8, 2019

I thought I should let you know that Packt Publishing, the company behind the publication of the Azure DevOps Server 2019 Cookbook, is running a juicy promotion this month… From 2nd September to 30th September all ebooks and videos on the Packt website are $10 a pop.

Boom! Every eBook & video for $10 across the site from the 2nd-30th September.

How to build your .NET projects targeting latest version of C#

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Aug 3, 2019

Recently our development team decided to use C# 7.1 language features. However our builds on Azure DevOps started failing quickly. In this quick post we will see how to build your solution targeting the latest version of C# on Azure DevOps.

Perfecting Continuous Delivery of NuGet packages for Azure Artifacts

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 18, 2019

In order to release software often and consistently, it is essential that software dependencies are managed using a good package management solution. Managing dependencies, if not planned well, can over a period of time become extremely difficult to maintain - especially due to difficulty in managing versions, testing of the packages and nested dependencies. With the increased focus from organizations to break monolithic applications into micro-services, teams have started to break their hard dependencies into manageable packages (NuGet, npm and others.)

Azure Pipelines - Git checkout step fails with cannot lock ref error

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 6, 2019

For one of our clients, we noticed their builds started failing at the checkout step. Looking at the logs the error was

error: cannot lock ref 'refs/remotes/origin/<branch>': there is a non-empty directory '.git/refs/remotes/origin/<branch>' blocking reference 'refs/remotes/origin/<branch>'

In this post we will see what was the root cause and how to fix it.

Announcement: Azure DevOps Server 2019 cookbook... Go get it!

Tarun Arora on May 30, 2019

Pleased to announce that my second book on Azure DevOps has hit the stands, this time around co-authored with fellow MVP & good friend Utkarsh Shigihalli… Go get your copy to unlock and fully leverage all that Azure DevOps server 2019 has to offer… Whether you are getting started with DevOps or are already implementing it, this book will help you accelerate your journey to DevOps…

View branch policies of your Azure DevOps repository using Azure CLI

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 2, 2019

Branch policies in Azure DevOps repositories are a great way to enforce the team’s code quality. With right branch policies you can ensure all the developer commits meet the required conditions. However, as you add more repositories managing or revisiting these policies becomes a pain especially because you need to view repo by repo. In this post we will see how we can use Azure DevOps extension for Azure CLI to quickly view all the policies applied to the repo via command line and also see ways to create/update existing repos.

Wish all your Azure DevOps users merry xmas with banner messages!

Tarun Arora on Dec 17, 2018

VSTS CLI has an admin commandlet that let’s you control the banner messages on Azure DevOps interface. Apart from being able to see existing banners already in place, you can create banner messages. What’s really cool is you’ll be able to set a category for the message and the expiry datetime. How about using the banner messages to wish your users a geeky merry xmas and new years! Check out how to do this…

Start blogging with Jekyll, GitHub and Netlify

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 10, 2018

I thought I will write a small blog post on how we host this blog. This is a JAMstack site, meaning what you see is just JavaScript, (no) APIs and Markup. We host this blog for free using Jekyll and Netlify. We also love the fact that we get to write blog posts in markdown files - commit the file and within few min your post is live!. Sounds interesting? Let me explain in detail.

Slide Deck - Azure Operations Management Suite

Tarun Arora on Nov 25, 2018

Continuous Monitoring for DevOps with Azure Operations Management Suite​ slides from my talk at the London Microsoft DevOps meetup in November 2018…

How I built a dashboard in Azure Portal to track Gitflow feature branches

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Nov 4, 2018

GitFlow is one of the popular branching strategies if you using Git version control. Most of the teams I have worked with generally are very satisfied using it. With fixed branch names, pull requests for code reviews, teams find that it fits very nicely with their day to day workflow. In this blog post, you will see how I built a useful dashboard in Azure portal to track whether teams following Gitflow strategy (especially their topic branches) as they should, giving teams an easy way to track stale branches and keeping their branches neat and tidy.