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Azure DevOps

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 …

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 …

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 …

Move from Azure Boards to GitHub Projects (beta) ?

About projects (beta) - GitHub Docs
New GitHub Projects (beta) view

GitHub announced new Projects Beta, that is new version of the “old” GitHub Projects. Projects Beta (later PB) aims to solve the issue that Microsoft is currently having with GitHub and that is the lack of project management tools. Sadly this tool is not the complete solution, but it sure has some interesting features.

Azure DevOps vs GitHub: which tool is better? - Predica Group
Microsoft DevOps as described in DevOps Dojo:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/devops-dojo-people-teams/

This picture is …

Run AzureDevOps pipelines from Elgato Stream Deck

Elgato Stream Deck is a fancy USB device that can be used to control lights, OBS and many other things. It has wide range of plugins, which can be installed easily from Stream Deck Store. Currently the plugin store does not contain any plugins to use AzureDevOps, so of course I had to fix this shortcoming.

How to create Stream Deck plugin

The Stream Deck has plugin SDK’s for multiple …

Azure DevOps Pricing

Azure DevOps pricing can feel a bit confusing, but the pricing model is surprisingly easy to understand and the Azure DevOps is actually very cheap to use compared to another CI/CD systems. Pricing is based on the number of users and the extra services that are bought. First five (5) users are FREE. After that every new user costs 5.06€ per month, unless you are adding stakeholder OR invited …

Infrastructure as Code with Azure DevOps and Bicep

Bicep is a language for declaratively deploying Azure resources. You can use Bicep instead of JSON for developing your Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates). Bicep simplifies the developing process by providing shorter syntax and really nice intellisense support for Visual Studio Code.

Bicep is based on “.bicep” files that are written with Visual Studio Code (or any other text editor, but I recommend to use the Code). If Bicep …

Automatically create work items from Application Insights exceptions

In the last blog post we looked how we can manually create work items into Azure DevOps from Application Insights. Manual labor is something that we want to avoid in DevOps world, so let’s take a look how we can automatically create bug type of work item into Azure DevOps when error is detected in Application Insights. The guide seems quite long, but actually you can do it in 15 …

Work Item Migration

Every now and then I’m asked to do a Work Item migration from one Azure DevOps organization (or project) to another and as it is not that rare case anymore, it is still surprisingly hard to do and there are few good reasons why.

Migrations Are Tricky

The most common problem with migration is that, the source data is not integrated. It has lots of special cases and edges that …