DevOps

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. However it has always been, let’s say, light in features related to Pipelines and Issues. GitHub seems to be getting a lot of love from Microsoft and both Actions and Issues are evolving at a fast pace while maintaining the GitHub flair. You can check the Actions changelog and Issues changelog. ...

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 .NET + Node developer environment. ...

Ephemeral developer environments are short-lived and typically serve a single purpose. Perhaps you are away from your development computer or you are working on completely different projects and don’t want to “polute” one or the other. For instance, I have a policy of not mixing up work and personal projects. If I am not at home, I typically don’t have my blog code or environment setup. I spent some time working with both gitpod.io and replit.com. The goal is to setup my blog environment, write a blog post, and publish it. This post was completely written and published using Gitpod. ...

When adding a certificate to AWS Certificate Manager, you need to have the certificate’s PEM encoded body, private key, and certificate chain. Note that unless you have a self signed certificate, you will need the certificate chain. If your cert has a chain but you don’t include it AWS will tell you an error occurred but it won’t tell you what’s wrong. I had to try and fail a few times before it worked. ...