Using System OAuth Token in the Agent Phase of the Azure DevOps Build Pipeline to Access Azure DevOps REST API

Azure DevOps REST API endpoints are service endpoints that allows to create,update,retrieve and delete the Azure DevOps service's resources. While executing these REST API commands it is required to use Authentication mechanisms in order for the API it to perform authorized operations. This post explains how to execute API commands without providing authentication as a Personal Access Token (PAT) in the script execution in a build job.

There is a configuration in the Azure DevOps build pipeline which enable the scripts and other process launched by tasks to access the OAuth token through the SYSTEM.ACCESS.TOKEN variable. When access to the system access token is enabled it is possible to use $env:SYSTEM_ACCESSTOKEN environment variable in the task scripts, that you are executing in a build pipeline job.

Resolving Queue Creation Script Failures Due to Delay in Applying Default Action of a Azure Storage Account in IaC

This post discusses an issue faced, while trying to allow in the default action of a storage account,  running PowerShell based Azure CLI, Infrastructure as code.

Issue : Requirement is to create a new azure storage queue using the PowerShell script in an existing storage account which is attached to a vnet and have access restrictions applied. Hence, the script needs to remove the restrictions to storage by setting Defualt Action to allow and then  create new storage queue. Once the new queue added to the storage, restrict the storage account access again. However, the time delay to apply the removal of restriction sometimes create an a hoc issue as the next step to create the queue fails with, network access error.

Mac OS Installation Help - How did I resolved issues encountered

This post discusses the common issues that you may also face while setting up Mac OS in a Mac Book by wiping out data and trying to do a new installation.

Problem 01 : Ask for admin user credentials when try to restart on recovery mode.

Solution:  Restart the mac. when it shut off and powers back on, press and hold Command + R until you see the apple logo. Instead of going to recovery page directly, some mac versions ask for user credentials. If you doesn't know the credentials still you can do the installation. You can find erase mac option from the top menu of the page. Erase the mac and start the mac installation process.

Setup MLOPS workspace using Azure DevOps pipeline

Machine Learning is training machines using set of data to do some valuable predictions for the different business and social needs. So, data scientists put lot of effort to train more usable and valuable mathematical representation of real world process which is known as a model. To do the training process it is very important to have a good computational resources to train the model. Azure Machine Learning workspace is one of the well-known model training and building platform many data scientists use. If data scientist and DevOps engineers work together, they can automate the model training and deployment process using CI/CD pipelines. This post discusses, how to create a Machine Learning (ML) workspace in Azure by using a Azure DevOps build, which will allow you to use for training and testing a model.

Pre requisites: Azure subscription and an Azure DevOps Account

Read NuGet Artifacts of External Azure DevOps Organization Feed

Azure DevOps artifacts feeds can be used to store different kind of artifacts of projects of your organization created. Sometimes we may need to use these artifacts in outside Azure DevOps organization. This post explains how can share feeds between organizations.

Prerequisites: PAT from the external Azure DevOps organization with feed read permission
                        External organization has feeds with NuGet packages in it

Enabling the Disabled Manage Test Controller window in Visual Studio When Using After Configuring a New Test Rig

This post discusses the issue that testers face while using the load test rig created with Visual Studio for the first time.After configuring the test controller and test agent for the test rig, you might need to track the status of the controller and agents. For that purpose, you can use Manage Test Controller section of the visual studio.

Prerequisites:
Load test rig configured using several machines

Resolving reading mal-formatted XML with PowerShell

This post explains a small issue faced while reading the XML configuration file values using a PowerShell script. You may have experienced the same issue while reading XML files with PowerShell. So, this post would help you to learn how we can resolve the issue.

Our requirement was to get the content of the App.config file and App.dll.config file to a PowerShell variable. It was possible to get the content of the App.config file to a PowerShell variable with following command.$appConfig is the App.config file path.

Updating App config in Azure Pipeline Using Octopus Variable set

This post discuss how to update App.Config in Azure pipeline using  Octopus variable set.

Prerequisites:

• Octopus environments
• Octopus variable sets
• Octopus project with variable sets attached

Let's identify how we configure a project and variable sets in the Octopus. Following image shows the Octopus variable and values defined with the scope.