I'm a keen user of Bun. Bun is a fast TypeScript / JavaScript runtime which can be used to speed up the TypeScript / JavaScript you have. It's a drop-in replacement for Node.js, and it's compatible with the vast majority of the Node.js ecosystem. (There are still rough edges that have issues.) In this post we'll look at how to use it in Azure Pipelines.
Bicep has had linting since version 0.4.1. It's a great way to ensure that your bicep files conform to best practices. Interestingly, when the linting feature first shipped, there wasn't an explicit lint command as part of the CLI. Instead, you had to run bicep build and it would run the linter as part of the build process. This was a little confusing as it was not obvious that the linter was running.
As of version 0.21.1 there is a dedicated bicep lint command. This is a nice step forwards; it allows you to explicitly lint your your code, rather than have it happen as a side effect of build. And it is useful if you want to run the linter as part of a CI/CD pipeline. What's more the bicep lint command is now available in the Azure CLI as well. You can run az bicep lint to lint your bicep files.
In this post we'll look at how to run lint Bicep in Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions, and surface the output in the UI.
If you deploy Bicep templates to Azure in Azure DevOps, you'll likely use the dedicated Azure DevOps task; the catchily named AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3. This task has had support for deploying Bicep since early 2022. But whilst vanilla Bicep is supported, there's a use case which isn't supported; private Bicep registries.
Build validations are a great way to protect your branches in Azure DevOps. It's possible to use the Azure DevOps API to acquire the build validations a project uses. This post shows you how using curl and the Node.js API.
Azure Static Web Apps have just released a new feature for Azure DevOps users called "named preview environments". They allow users to deploy changes to an environment, prior to merging.
Private Azure Artifact feeds in in Azure DevOps can be used to serve NuGet packages. To build applications both locally and in an Azure Pipeline using those packages, there are a few steps to follow which this post will demonstrate.
I love Netlify deploy previews. This post implements a pull request deployment preview mechanism for Azure Static Web Apps in the context of Azure DevOps which is very much inspired by the Netlify offering.
How can we deploy resources to Azure, and then run an integration test through them in the context of an Azure Pipeline? This post will show how to do this by permissioning our Azure Pipeline to access these resources using Azure RBAC role assignments. It will also demonstrate a dotnet test that runs in the context of the pipeline and makes use of those role assignments.
This post demonstrates how to deploy Azure Static Web Apps using Bicep and Azure DevOps. It includes a few workarounds for the "Provider is invalid. Cannot change the Provider. Please detach your static site first if you wish to use to another deployment provider." issue.
Creating an Azure Pipeline using the Azure DevOps REST API is possible, but badly documented. This post goes through how to do this.
I've recently found myself developing custom pipelines task extensions for Azure DevOps. The extensions being developed end up in the Azure DevOps Marketplace. What you see there when you look at existing extensions is some pretty lovely documentation.
The Azure DevOps Client library for Node.js has limitations and missing features, IGitApi.getRefs is missing pagination and IWikiApi is missing page create or update. This post details some of these issues and illustrates a workaround using the Azure DevOps REST API.
Let me start by telling you a dirty secret. I have an ASP.Net Core project that I build with VSTS. It is deployed to Azure through a CI / CD setup in VSTS. That part I'm happy with. Proud of even. Now to the sordid hiddenness: try as I might, I've never found a nice way to deploy Entity Framework database migrations as part of the deployment flow. So I have [blushes with embarrassment] been using the Startup of my ASP.Net core app to run the migrations on my database. There. I said it. You all know. Absolutely filthy. Don't judge me.
For the longest time I've been using the likes of Travis and AppVeyor to build open source projects that I work on. They rock. I've also recently been dipping my toes back in the water of Visual Studio Team Services. VSTS offers a whole stack of stuff, but my own area of interest has been the Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment offering.
To my lasting regret, TFS 2012 has no direct support for PowerShell. Such a shame as PowerShell scripts can do a lot of heavy lifting in a build process. Well, here we're going to brute force TFS 2012 into running PowerShell scripts. And along the way we'll also get Karma test results publishing into TFS 2012 as an example usage. Nice huh? Let's go!
TypeScript first gained support for tsconfig.json back with the 1.5 release. However, to my lasting regret and surprise Visual Studio will not be gaining meaningful support for it until TypeScript 1.8 ships. However, if you want it now, it's already available to use in beta.
So, you want to use C# 6 language features and you’re working on an older project that’s still rocking .NET 4.5. Well, with some caveats, you can.
Well sort of... Perhaps this post should more accurately called "How to get CI to ignore your TypeScript whilst Visual Studio still compiles it..."