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What’s new in Azure DevOps Boards Hubs?

The Azure DevOps Boards Hubs is basically a term for new improved “UX” of Azure DevOps Boards. The main principles and features in Boards remains the same, but the Boards Hubs improves the accessibility, readability and visualization of the Board pages. The feature affects Boards, Backlog, Sprints and Queries pages. The feature itself doesn’t bring anything completely new into table, only the UX improvements.

How to enable

My Thoughts About GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an AI code assistant which helps you to write code and increases your productivity. Copilot is currently in closed beta (preview), but you can get yourself into waitlist and hopefully get invitation in just few months. I think I got my invitation like in six weeks.

Copilot can be installed to Visual Studio as an extension and the extension is available at the Visual Studios own marketplace. …

DevSecOps with Azure DevOps Auditing

Picture of two security cameras.
Kuvaaja Scott Webb palvelusta Pexels

Shift-Left in security has been a trend for awhile and the reason for that is, that automated CI/CD pipelines are tempting breach points for hackers. Unprotected CI/CD pipeline is easy and tempting route into production environment and can cause some serious issues. One way to improve security is to monitor our pipelines for an unwanted changes. Azure DevOps has some great tools for implementing the …

How to Setup Different Test Environments in Azure DevOps Test Plans

In the last blog post we looked how Azure DevOps Test Plans is used to structure testing and how we can run the regression testing. In this post we are going to look how Test Plans can be used to handle different test environments and how we can improve our test cases with parameters.

Configurations (Environments)

Configurations is a Test Plan feature that can be used to define different environments …

How to use Azure DevOps Test Plans

Azure Test Plans provides tools for testers to improve software quality and collaboration throughout the development process. The browser-based test management solution provides capabilities for planned manual testing, user acceptance testing, exploratory testing, and gathering feedback from stakeholders.

The typical use case of Test Plans is manual testing that should either happen along the development within sprints, or release testing that aims for the stable release of software.

Features

The …

How to Get a Software Developer Job

How to get a software developer job?

During my career I have recruited dozens (and interviewed even more) of software developers, architects and junior software developers. To help you get your dream/first job I would like to share some of the things that I am looking for during the interview.

First impression

First impression is important part of social interaction, but it does not define everything. It is perfectly fine to screw up the first impression, but …

Azure DevOps Wiki and Mermaid diagrams

Mermaid
Photo by Victoria Borodinova from Pexels

Mermaid is a Javascript based diagramming and charting tool that renders markdown like text definitions into SVG diagrams. It works little bit like PlantUML, but does not require any extensions to run. Rendering is done simply with JS library that produces embeddable SVG images. Azure DevOps have had the support for Mermaid diagrams since 2019 (cloud version only) and it is a great …

Purge Azure Front Door Cache in Azure DevOps

Azure Front Door | Microsoft Azure
Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door is a great Azure product to provide extra security, traffic management and monitoring services in front of web services. Azure Front Door also supports CDN style of caching for static files like images and CSS files. One part of caching is the ability to purge the cache. Remove the non-valid and old items from cache.

One common problem with cache is, that when the …

Continuous Deployment of Azure SQL Database Changes

Picture by Samarth Singhai from Pexels

Deploying SQL database changes automatically through CI/CD pipeline is important and a bit tricky part of deployment pipeline. You don’t want to apply your database changes only manually, because that can lead easily into problems like scripts not working or someone forgot to run one important script into production. Azure DevOps does not have native support for SQL scripts, but there are plenty of …

Deploy Azure Container App from Azure DevOps

Hello World image of the Container Apps

November 02, 2021 Microsoft published new way to run Docker applications in the Azure. The Azure Container Apps is more of a SAAS version of the good old Azure Container Instances (ACI). There are some differences between these services like in the accessibility of the Kubernetes API, but I’m not now going to dive any deeper into that. However in this blog post I’m going to tell you how to …