Build .NET Core 3.0 Projects with Azure DevOps Pipeline Using Hosted Agents

.NET Core 3.0 is still in preview 7 and some of you may have already started developing projects with it. Implementing CI/CD is important to any project regardless of whether you are using bleeding edge technology or not. It is possible to setup your own build server with the required preview components setup a builds. However, if you can utile the hosted agents in Azure DevOps Services that would remove the burden of maintaining your own build server. Hence, let’s look at the steps required to build a .NET core 3.0 application with hosted 2019 agents.

Customizing Columns in Your Azure DevOps Sprint/Task Boards

Kanban flow of the Azure Boards for user stories, features or other top level back log boards was a feature available in Azure DevOps Boards for a long time. However, it was not possible to change the sprint board columns in Azure DevOps, without introducing new states to Task work item or any work item which is using sprint board previously. This long awaited community request has been now completed and available in Azure DevOps services. Azure DevOps on-premise server does not have this feature we can hope it would be added to the on-premise server eventually. Let’s look at how we can customize the columns in the Sprint boards with this new feature.

Resolving 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'azure_services' While Setting a Network Rule to Azure Key Vault

As infrastructure automation is vital aspect of DevOps, you might want to setup an Azure Key Vault to use a Subnet in a vnet, programmatically. For this you can use Azure Command Line Interface (CLI) and you may run into an error 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'azure_services'. Let’s have a look at how to get this issue resolved.

Fixing Azure DevOps Xamarine Build error XA5300: The Java SDK Directory could not be found

When you try to build xamarine android projects with Azure Pipelines hosted agent Windows 2019 with VS2019 you might encounter error “XA5300: The Java SDK Directory could not be found”, if you are using a visual studio build task or msbuild task to build a solution which includes android projects. This is caused due to the inability to find the java sdk in the hosted agent. Let’s see how we can get this issue fixed.

Controlling Pull Request Source Branches for Given Target Branch in Azure Git Repos

Generally you can create pull request from any given source branch to a any given target branch in Azure Git repos. You can setup a pull request validation build which evaluates the repo state, by performing a pre merge in the build server to ensure, your repo build succeeds after the pull request is merged to the target branch. You can set the branch policies so that the pull request cannot be merged to a given target branch if the validation build fails or if the approvers not approve the pull request. However, you might want to follow a branching strategy, which requires you to control from which branches a pull request can be created and merged to a targeting branch. The purpose of controlling the pull request source and target would be to assure your team is adhering to a defined branching and merge strategy. Let’s look at using a task in pull request validation build to ensure the request is coming from an allowed/valid branch, and make the build to fail if it is coming from an invalid branch.

Join a Personal Azure DevOps Organization to a Company Domain

You might have started using Azure DevOps using Microsoft accounts. Later you may have established a company and may want to move the current Microsoft account based Azure DevOps organization to work with your company active directory users. Let’s look at the steps required to join a personal Microsoft account based Azure DevOps organization to a company domain.

Azure DevOps Service Connection for an Azure Subscription in Another Azure AD

Adding Azure Subscription to Azure DevOps  as service connection is really simple when you have the same account you are using for Azure DevOps associated with your Azure Subscription. However, this may not be the case always and you may want to deploy to resources in a Azure Subscription which is not related to your Azure DevOps organization. Let’s see how to create a service connection in such situation to utilize it in a deployment pipeline.

Setting a Release Variable to Make It Available to Other Stages in Azure DevOps Release Pipeline

You can easily set a variable in a build or release pipeline by executing “##vso[task.setvariable variable=variablename;]variablevalue” . This sets the variable for the scope of a given stage in a release pipeline. However, it does not allow you to set a variable in the scope of a release. That means if you want to set a variable value in stage and then use it in subsequent stages it is not possible to do it with  ##vso[task.setvariable . Let’s look at achieving this need using Azure DevOps REST API.
The script available here can be used for this purpose. A slightly modified version of the script to support release pipeline and enable sending any variable name and value for updating a value of a given variable can be found here.