DevOps

Choosing the right DevOps tool can streamline your development processes and accelerate time to market for features. Two of the most prominent options available today are Azure DevOps (ADO) and GitHub. In this very opinionated post (you’ve been warned), I will guide you towards picking the right tool for your situation. What about other options? We might discuss other options in the future. I am assuming you are familiar with both tools already....

Back in August 2022, I posted about Ephemeral environments and compared GitPod and Replit. While Codespaces was first made GA in August 2021, making it fairly mature then, there were no free plans yet so I didn’t spend any time in it. Fast forward to November 2022, and GitHub has released free offerings for Codespaces. As of writing, a free GitHub account can use up to 60 hours for free. It is time to revisit Ephemeral Environments and play with GitHub Codespaces....

I have used Azure DevOps and its predecessors (Visual Studio Team Services and TFS) for a long time. In fact, I think my first time ever with TFS was back in 2007. Thus, that is usually my go-to solution for DevOps. It is undeniable how good Azure DevOps boards and pipelines are. I have also extensively used GitHub, but it was typically for smaller and personal projects. It is hands-down the best tool for repositories....

It is not uncommon in consulting to work out of dedicated VMs for each customer. This helps create a strong segregation between internal and each client workstream. If you use Hyper-V, chances are that you already have a template VM and use copies of it, so you don’t setup everything over and over. In this post, I will do exactly that, but introduce as much automation using PowerShell as possible....

Back in March I posted about Automated and repeatable Environment Setup. In that version of the environment setup, I used Chocolatey because it has always been my go-to Windows app installer. However, the latest versions of Windows 10 and 11 comes with winget pre-installed. In this post, I will show how to setup a similar developer environment but using winget instead of chocolatey. Similarly to the last post, I will focus on a typical ....