Some ideas on feature flags

In the last weeks I have had several interesting conversations on feature flags, so I just wanted to do a little brain dump on my ideas/views on feature flags, this are my particular views at this moment, they can change :). Also, at this moment I have not heavly used them in production, I have […]

Opinion: What and why YAML Azure Pipelines

In the last days I have had several conversations around YAML Azure pipelines, some people asking me whya they should go from old “moving boxes” mode to YAML Azure Pipelines. So here goes my opinion on this, disclaimer, this is just and opinion post, don’t expect here instructions, but just my one (not event two) […]

Environment variables and Azure Pipelines

Some days ago talking with Sergio Navarro (if you don’t follow him you should) he raised a question about setting environment variables in an Azure Pipeline so a container can use it in the build. The answer was easy, the great news are: all variables declared in an Azure Pipeline are “executed” (I couldn’t find […]

Universal packages with Azure DevOps Artifacts

If you are already familiar with Azure Artifacts in Azure DevOps probaly you know about Nuget, Maven, or NPM. But there is another kind of artifact less known, and which is really useful, the Universal Packages. Surely you have need to share a set of files with different projects, we are not talking of assemblies, […]

Azure DevOps from Hosted XML process to inherited process

Migrating a Team Foundation Server Azure Devops Server from on-premises to cloud, it is common we have done some customizations to the process templates, which can’t be migrated directly to any of the existing templates in Azure DevOps Services. When this happens, for every project with customizations, a new Hosted XML process is created in […]

Variable library groups and Azure Key Vault

In my previous post, I explained how to use Azure Key Vault values in a particular Build/Release, but as Vinicius Moura posted in twitter, there is another option using Libraries in your Team Project, and I wanted to just give my opinion or how I use one or another option. Just to introduce it, Libraries […]

Using Azure Key Vault Secrets for your VSTS Releases

DISCLAIMER: I’m assuming you already have created your Azure Key Vault, and stored secrets/certificates in it, if you are not familiar with this (it is super-easy) you can check this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/key-vault-get-started This is a short but, at least for me, very useful topic for keeping your deployment secrets more secure. Most of the times, […]

Debugging deployed Azure Web Apps with VSTS Symbol Server

Obviously, debugging an already deployed application, doesn’t matter if Azure or any other environment, is something we must use as a last resort, I would always prefer to be able to reproduce some kind of situation with a local test and correct it. But sometimes we would need to debug an already deployed application, and […]

Phased deployments with Release Management gates

When we are enabling continuous deployment in development teams, there are a lot of things we must take care. First of all, enabling continuous deployment is not about throwing new code or features to the users, nevertheless the quality or the value it gives, this is about enabling a continuous value flow from development to […]

Work Items bulk edit with templates on VSTS

There are some occasions in which you need to apply the same changes to multiple Work Items, not only once, but several times during a project, for sure most of you already know the edit selected items feature, with several Work Items selected, just right click and select edit (sorry I had to protect the […]