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Streamlining Backlog Refinement with Azure DevOps
Scrum product backlog refinement with Azure DevOps can be greatly improved just by adding a couple of extra states to the Product Backlog Item or User Story work item types. Here’s how to do it.
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Fixing JSON parsing exception “value could not be converted” using a JsonConverter
I’ve been working on a tool lately to parse a bunch of work item data from Azure DevOps. Specifically, I needed to call the Work Item Updates REST service in order to get all the state value changes for a bunch of work items. Everything was fine until I needed to convert the JSON result…
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Azure DevOps API Continuation Tokens / Graph API not returning all users
I was doing some work last week with Azure DevOps user and security management Graph APIs. The Graph APIs let you manage users, and groups, and group memberships and I needed to make some changes for a couple thousand user accounts. It was definitely worth automating. When I was working with the API call that…
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Azure DevOps: Handling Pictures & Attachments the Azure DevOps Wiki
Are you trying to figure out how to deal with attachments in your Azure DevOps wiki? Here are some tips.
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How to Migrate Azure DevOps to the Cloud
If you’ve decided that you need to do a full migration to Azure DevOps Services (aka. The Azure DevOps Cloud), there’s a tool for migration. And a guide. A 60 page guide. And then there’s the documentation. Let’s face it, migrating your on-premise Team Foundation Server or Azure DevOps Server to the cloud isn’t exactly…
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Migrating to the Azure DevOps Cloud: What Are Your Options?
Every few weeks, I talk to a potential customer about migrating their on-premise Azure DevOps Server or Team Foundation Server to the cloud. There’s almost always a certain level of confusion because — well — it’s really confusing. There’s a lot of things to think about and it’s not always clear what the best way…
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How to Edit Your Azure DevOps Wiki as a Git Repository
In Azure DevOps each Team Project gets a wiki. A wiki is a great place to store/share text content like documentation in your project. But did you know that you can access it as a Git repository? Accessing your Wiki via Git helps to make editing your wiki content simple. It also enables you to…
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Azure DevOps: ‘Removed’ Work Items Missing from ‘Assigned to me’ Query Results
I got a question from a customer yesterday as part of an upgrade to Azure DevOps 2020. He was telling me that some of the work items that were assigned to him were missing from the “Assigned to me” work item query results. He showed it to me and — sure enough — they were…
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Azure DevOps Tips: Handling Strings in YAML Pipelines
Yesterday I wrote a post about an error I was getting in an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline script. The gist was that I had a long string in the YAML file and I was running into a problem using the YAML string literal pipe ‘|’ syntax. Well, in my effort to understand what the specification…
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YAML error in azure-pipelines.yml: “Bad indentation of a mapping entry”
Love it or hate it, you’ve got to admit that YAML build pipeline scripts can be a brittle. One little bit of whitespace out of place and — boom! — you staring at a ton of errors. I ran into two related errors yesterday while I was working on an Azure DevOps pipeline script: “bad…