Before you can assign work items to a sprint (or an iteration) in Azure DevOps, someone needs to create those sprints. That boring task is a great candidate for delegation. Unfortunately, the only role that can do this work by default is the project administrator. Before you turn everyone into a project administrator, let me show you a much more granular way to achieve the same goal.
A few weeks ago, one of our Windows Server made a reboot in the middle of the day. That was not planned, so we wanted to know what happened. Windows logs events like the reboot in the event log. The challenge is to find the right message in the huge pile of unrelated log messages. As it turns out, we can use a filter and get the right message in no time.
As I was working on a project, GitHub Desktop bombarded me with this login dialog:
Figuring out what version of .Net is on your computer is not so easy to answer. Do you have the new .Net or the .Net Framework? Let’s look at ways to answer this questions.
If you try to create a folder with a leading dot, like the .well-known folder for domain validation or the security.txt, you may end up with the error "You must type a file name" on Windows Server:
We run into a strange error when we added a new environment variable to our Docker Compose file:
ERROR: Invalid interpolation format for "environment" option in service "api": "MY_KEY=Abc$5"
One of the most important ideas of agile software development is for me the short feedback cycle. Instead of working for weeks or even months at a problem on our own, we try to get feedback as fast as we can. That not only works with user stories; we can apply this idea to every task independently of its size.
I experienced a great example of this principle a few weeks ago. Using this example, I would like to give you an idea of how to put a principle into action. For the sake of brevity, I am using the format of a PAR statement (problem, action, result).
We created a new build agent pool for Visual Studio 2022 in Azure DevOps. To check if everything works, we temporarily switched jobs to the new agent pool. That worked for most jobs, but not for all. A few where stubborn and keep running on the old agent pool. How can that be?
As it turns out there are three and not just two places where we can choose the agent pool.
I am a big fan of Octopus Deploy. This tool helps us to deploy our applications with ease and in a reliable way. In fact, it is so easy that I always forget the few important settings you need to have in place so that Octopus can do its magic.
We are currently migrating our larger databases to SQL Server 2019. While the migration went smoothly for the small databases, there was an unexpected problem with the last server: the backup was incredibly slow.
The first larger database we moved to the new server took 10 times longer to back up than on the old server (50 minutes instead of 5). If the backup time would proportionally increase with the database size, our biggest database would use the whole maintenance window just for the backup task. We had to fix this problem immediately.