Patch files using GitHub Actions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 6, 2020

Recently I have been spending more time with GitHub Actions. If you don’t know already, GitHub actions allow you to orchestrate workflow (CI/CD) based on events like push, pull-request etc. Not only you can use actions available in the GitHub Marketplace, you also build your own. I wanted to experiment, how easy it is to develop one. So I just did that and built an custom action.

VSIX Viewer - A Visual Studio Code extension to view contents of VSIX files

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jan 5, 2020

Do you develop Visual Studio Marketplace Extensions? Then you might already be aware of VSIX file types. VSIX file types are basically zip files with additional metadata to extend various Microsoft products like Visual Studio, VSCode and Azure DevOps. I wanted a way to quickly view contents of VSIX file without leaving the VSCOde editor. So I decided to write an extension for VSCode to quickly view the VSIX contents. This post highlights features of the extension and way I have setup CICD for automatic publishing to VSMarketplace.

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.