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Project used for this example can be found in GitHub.

SonarCloud is free for Open Source projects, and for languages like Python, that does not need compilation, it can directly analyze the repository without any intervention from the author.

One of the great advantage of Codespaces is the ability to preconfigure the environment so you do not need to waste time installing and configuring your toolchain.

GitGraph is a nice library to create a graphic representation of Git log and the really nice aspect is that it is widely used and produces picture that are easily recognized as Git History.

In previous post I explored the many advantages I’ve found using GitHub codespaces to author blog posts directly in a browser.

The scenario I played a little bit with GitHub Codespaces when it was in preview, now it is time to try to use it real activities to understand scenarios where it can be useful.

I have a friend that asked me how to choose an enviroment in a GitHub action based on the branch that triggered the action.

Even if 7zip is not a real DevOps argument, it is really interesting in the context of a build pipeline and artifacts publishing.

Let’s start from the problem, I have an Azure DevOps pipeline that calls a PowerShell script and the team needs to change the pipeline allowing a boolean parameter to be passed to the PowerShell script when you queue the pipeline.

I’ve already blogged on the security scanning capability offered by GitHub and in this post I want to give you another example on a possible output.

Cryptography is a fascinating subject, surely complex, but as a developer you probably have some predefined libraries in your language/environment of choice that you can use.

First of all I want to thank my friend Giulio Vian for pointing me in the right direction and for its great work in TfsAggregator Action.

Edit: I’ve stored gist of the script here Winget is finally here and we can, at least, using a package manager on windows to simplify application management.

Edit: actually I missed that I can add mshome.net to host name to correctly identify the ip of the host computer, like suggested here In a WSL2 instance you are running inside a Virtual Environment managed by your Windows Operating system, and the greatest

After a really loooooong time, finally Windows has its own Package Manager called Windows Package Manager 1.0.

MongoDb is a great option for NoSql but sometimes it is installed in production forgetting some basic maintenance tasks, like managing log files.

I have lots of pipelines with SonarCloud analysis, and in the last months I’ve started receiving warning for an old version of Java used in pipeline.

When you create a function in PowerShell you need to remember that if you write output, this will be included in the returned value.

I’m a great fan of Azure DevOps pipelines, I use them extensively, but I also a fan of simple building strategies, not relying on some specific build engine.

I’m studying Terraform Up and Running book, a really good book but all the examples are for AWS.

Let’s suppose you have a Microservices based solution, you have many different processes and each process communicates with standard WebAPI.

As you can read directly from GitHub blog post GitHub code scanning is now available and ready to use for your repositories.

Well, you know me, I like to have my code analyzed by SonarCloud when possible, and since it is free for open source, I always use Azure DevOps pipeline to automatically analyze code on each push.

After conversion of all of my blog posts, I have more than 1000 page to upload, and even if I left old image in original location my publish time increased a lot as you can see from Figure 1.

It was almost one year from my switch from WordPress to Hugo and I’m really really satisfied from the result.

Configuring a build to build each commit to constantly verify quality of code is usually a good idea, but sooner or after, in big solutions, you start filling pipeline queue.

I’ve done another couple of videos about Security Onion focusing on how I can use The hunt to look for anomalies in network traffic.

Kali Linux on Windows Most of the time a Kali Linux instance running in WSL is more than enough to have some fun in a Windows box.

When you build a project that depends on Azure DevOps hosted nuget feed, usually if the feed is on the same organization of the pipeline and you are using Nuget task, everything regarding authentication happens automatically.

Ok, I know that many of you are questioning: Why using Azure DevOps to analyze code with CodeQL?

When I teach to customer Azure DevOps pipeline, I always suggest them to avoid the classic editor and direct learn the tool using yaml pipeline; while we can agree that classic GUI based editor is simpler, it also miss many of the advantages of YAML and h…

If you want to setup a real lab to test Network Security Monitor solution, like Security Onion probably you will start with some virtual machine where to install everything.

If you start managing your backlog with Azure Boards, you probably will end having Epics->Features->User stories breakdown and as manager you have a usual question to answer where are we on this epics or feature and when you expect it to be finished.

Building with PowerShell or other scripting engine is a really nice option because you can reuse the script in almost any Continuous Integration engine with a minimal effort, but sometimes there are tools that causes some headache.

There are times when using Invoke-WebRequest in PowerShell is really slow, especially compared to a direct download in a browser.

This is a really basic fact, but it is often underestimated.

Publishing PowerShell helper functions to PowerShell gallery is a good solution to maximize reuse on Build and general Scripting for DevOps mundane tasks.

There are situation when you need to push frequently on a Git repository, a typical example is when you are authoring a yaml pipeline and you are experimenting stuff; in such a situation you modify the pipeline, push, test and go on.

After I did some maintenance on my WSUS with some tricks I still had problem, after hours of cleanup, PowerShell script stopped working and constantly gave me a timeout.

I have a very old HP Proliant Microserver, it has 16 GB of RAM and an SSD, but it is really old, it is powered by a really old Turion CPU and WSUS is starting to becoming unresponsive.

I’m not a Python expert, but I used it more often these days and I use Visual Studio Code with Python extension to author my scripts.

As you can read directly from GitHub blog post GitHub code scanning is now available and ready to use for your repositories.

If you have Azure DevOps pipelines that uses SonarCloud analyzer, you should update java version for your agents if you are using version 8 because support is going to drop.

The problem Several years ago I had a friend called me for a problem with MongoDb, it turns out that someone, from an IP geolocated in China, accessed the instances during the night and wiped out everything.

What is GitHub codespaces Visual Studio Code is becoming one of the most used and productive editors in all operating system and it is used by most developers.

Even if you do not plan to use Docker to distribute your application you can use it to speedup setup of development environment, for new developers and for new machines.

I’ve dealt in the past on how to integrate SonarCloud analysis in a TFS/AzDo pipeline but today it is time to update that post with some interesting nice capabilities.

One of the most requested feature for Azure DevOps is the ability to restrict state transition for custom processes.

Even if Release changes seems to have no breaking changes in MongodDb Driver latest upgrade, it is possible that your code could be affected by a change in the driver and you starts having strange exception with code that works perfectly with an older ver…

The term T-Shaped Professional or T-Shaped Skills is widely used to identify a person that has a good deep knowledge in a specific area and a broad knowledge on other areas.