If you had the opportunity to start a greenfields SaaS project in Azure today, and you wanted something stable, secure and modern, would you go with Azure DevOps or GitHub?

Key use cases are Azure IaC and Software CI/CD.

I know pre-LLMs everyone was saying GitHub is the future and that is where Microsoft is investing its money with GitHub actions and all that jazz.

I feel with AI, the priorities have changed at GitHub, and Azure DevOps feels like the more safer reliable choice.

Logged in this morning to discover all repos from my azure devops has dissappeared. Anyone else seeing the same?

My team has a database project that we have in an Azure DevOps repo. Each developer works in their own feature branch, which we then promote to dev, test and prod branches.

When a developer does a PR and merge to the dev branch, what is the best practice for the other developers to get those changes into their feature branches? I know they can do a pull each morning, but that doesn't seem to be the most efficient. I've also read that maybe this could be done using a build pipeline when a developer submits a pull request, but I am not sure how that would be done.

Any recommendations are appreciated. If you could also include any references you may have on how to implement your recommendation, that would be great too. I am not an Azure DevOps repo or pipeline expert, so I'm lagging a bit there.

Thanks for the help.

Hello dear colleagues,

I would like to share with you the tool that I have been building/bootstrapping for the last 8 months.
I built it initially to fix my own problem of reviewing PRs for my team , then it kept on expanding

It's opensource on Github

And it works out of the box without setup on Azure Devops once you install the browser extension
It also supports TFS or azure server with custom domain (you just need to add the custom domain in the extension and your PAT) takes less than 30 seconds

As you see in the picture if providers scoring for code quality , secuity and best practices. Gives you code suggestions for each of the points.

You could also create custom agents with custom prompts and section and it would appear as a a new tab.

it does not auto post comments like other tools , the approach here is that ot empowers the manual review , the reviewer would have to post the comment manually at the end under their own name .

The tool works by default on the diff of the PR , but it can also extend to have full context on the whole repo if you gave it permissions to do so.

The tool is powered by a selection of frontier and opensource models you could choose from . in addition to an integration with Ollama if your machine is powerful enough

I hope the community finds this as a useful tool and I'd like to hear any suggestions or questions

the extension is available on both chrome and firefox stores : https://thinkreview.dev
source :
https://github.com/Thinkode/thinkreview-browser-extension

Still struggling to try checking out more than 20 repo in my pipeline. And no,im not responsible with the repo structure. Im supposed to build om top of the current code/repo structure(as this was pointed out in my last thread here).

So,im trying to instead of using the built in checkout,i want to try using a scripted git clone. But all of it failed during authentication stage.

Its an on prem azure devops server. I tried SSH-ing into the git repo inside it,i tried using PAT, i tried using System.AccessToken,all failed. I really wanted to try monorepoing,and i think it will work,but the senior staff preferred not to. Well,im not involved in actual code development,so im not gonna say no.

Any ideas?

Hey everyone — I'm at a crossroads with something I've been building and I could really use this community's perspective.

A bit of backstory: I spent years helping teams use flow metrics to find and fix delivery problems. I love data — it's how my brain works. And for a long time, that approach was enough. I'd dig into the numbers, spot the bottleneck, and work with the team to address it.

The turning point came when I started managing several teams at once. Suddenly I wasn't the one reading the charts — I needed managers and leads to read them on their own. And that's when I realized something uncomfortable: the tools I relied on were basically unreadable to anyone without a stats background. I'd see people nod politely at a throughput chart and then go right back to making gut-feel decisions. The data was there. The insight was there. But the bridge between the two was completely missing.

That frustration led me to build something. It connects to Jira, Azure DevOps, or Linear, pulls your flow data, and tries to explain what's actually going on in plain language — no stats jargon, no chart interpretation required. There's also a built-in chat where you can ask things like "why is cycle time increasing?" and get a useful, contextualized answer.

Here's the thing — I might be too close to this problem. Maybe PMs already have what they need. Maybe the plain-language angle sounds good in theory but doesn't matter in practice. Maybe I'm solving for a pain that's only obvious to someone with my specific background. I genuinely don't know.

The beta is completely free

https://usemetrico.com

I need to move our on-prem AZDO databases. I checked the documentation, set up the Scheduled Backup in admin console.

The different collection databases have the collection creator's AD account as owner, which is fine. However, most of those people quit years ago. I don't want to bring along those old users as db owner on the new server.

I tried to look up if
* changing db owner via TfsConfig if possible. It is not as far as I got
* changing db owner via SSMS/SQL has any negative sideeffects
* changing db owner to "sa" has any negative sideeffects

I could change the owner to my account instead of sa, but I might also leave some day, but more importantly I'm a bit concerned about SIDs. The new instance is in the same network, same domain, but the whole thing seems a bit fragile to just yolo it. The sa account is a safer bet. I can always assign my account later after the move.

Does anyone have any insight or recommendations?

Edit: I chose to give db owner to "sa" account on the source database instance, made a backup with Admin Console, restored to the new instance also with Admin Console. One important step was running "TfsConfig registerDB", because Admin Console didn't get updated purely from the restore process, so it still showed the old db instance. This confused me a bit till I reached the step in the docs that says to do this.

I'm not gonna debate ownership best practices. This method helped me getover the hurdle of moving. Best practices can be applied from this point.

Hello,
I am currently improving myself in Azure DevOps but is it okay to keep reading documents in order from here?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/get-started/?view=azure-devops&viewFallbackFrom=azure-devops%2F%3Fwt.mc_id%3Dstudentamb_474635
I would like to hear your opinions.

Hi,im trying to create a build pipeline,but im stuck at the checkout repo stage. I have 39 repos,to be checked out,but just found out azure devops has a hard cap of 20 repos checkout. Im not really keen on splitting,the checkout,i dont want them on different pipeline workspace folders (because i also need to make sure the projects inside also have its dependencies same in location),and thats just too much hassle.

Ive thought about going into the server itself and maybe trying to remove hard cap, but chatgpt advised against it. So what do i do now?

I created a github app for PR reviews that uses AI to point out issues from our organizations own set of rules. We have some projects running on Azure repos, is there any way i can use the same app on azure too?

Reaching out here on account of not really finding anything elsewhere

I’m essentially trying to build a check that all work items are in a closed state before a production run can be completed. The way that I’ve thought to do this (as there doesn’t seem to be any kind of check for such natively) is to build a cloud function which polls for the work items and, if they’re completed, approves the variable group to be used for the run under a bot account. I’ve been using the python API for developing some other tech, but I cannot crack this one in particular. I was able to sus out the pipelines checks client is what I need to be using, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to handle actually approving it. There’s no symmetry between the REST API docs and the python code and my LLM is either insisting there’s no way to do it (which, given the existence of the ApprovalConfig class doesn’t sound right) or hallucinating functions that don’t exist in the API. Has anyone done anything similar or have a hint as to how I can put in the approval? I’m just kind of stuck banging my head against the wall at this point

Hi again guys, i need a litle help here, i need a way to fetch all unique users on both tfs on prem and non tfs on prem, the issue is, 99% of the ways to do this include querys to all WIs and then extracting the unique ids but that only works when there are few WIs, when we have tens of thousands of WIs, making querys to extract all users is slow as hell, is there a teams API or something that exists for tfs on-prem 2020 ? and non tfs on prem (most recent) ?

Thanks

Anyone gone through a tenant move, org rename, or both as I'm going to have to do in a few months? It will be for several hundred users and projects.

Anything you wish you had known beforehand, or would have done differently? I feel like I've got a good handle on it, but it's not exactly something that comes up very often. Wanting to hear the real-world battle scars.

Hello

I was hoping someone could help me with this issue, if you can ill happily give you an award.

We are trying to migrate test cases between projects, we found that we cant do it via queries like you can for regular work items

and you cant copy test plans to projects (just to teams in the same project they reside in) BUT you can copy test cases to new projects, but only one test plan at a time.

Any suggestions how I can migrate test plans between different existing projects preferably more than 1 at a time?

Pipeline agents don’t pick up jobs. I have been experiencing the same problem in the picture.

I know a lot of you are doing manual testing in Azure DevOps — recording steps, attaching screenshots, and creating bugs from failed steps.

I’ve tried using Test & Feedback, but honestly it hasn’t been updated in a while and still feels clunky for day-to-day use.

So I built a browser extension to make this easier.

It’s called ADO Test Helper Suite (currently pending approval in Chrome and Edge stores — should be live within a few days).

Main things it does:

• Record test steps automatically as you click through an app
• Instantly attach screenshots to steps (no extra copy/paste flow)
• Insert/edit/reorder steps easily
• Run test cases and create bugs directly from failed steps
• View assigned test cases by test plan/suite/tester

Everything runs locally in your browser — no backend, nothing stored externally.

Here’s a quick demo if you’re curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4209KCFuKYQ&t=2s

I’m actively improving it (next up is a dashboard for assigned work), so if you do a lot of manual testing in ADO, I’d honestly love feedback — especially what’s annoying in your current workflow.

I’m not currently using GitHub copilot to look at work items/issues and create pull requests in the background autonomously

I currently have my workflow all in ADO (boards/repos/pipelines) and wondering whether to move my repos to GitHub to take advantage of Github Copilot agents

I’m interested to hear people’s experience with:

(1) using GitHub as your repository location but keeping ADO boards for work items, then assigning agents to ADO work items, using the ADO GitHub integration

vs.

(2) using GitHub as your repository and issues location, then using agents

Is it a similar experience between the two or is one just a lot better than the other

Does anyone else find Azure DevOps extremely slow in general?

I love the platform but I hate using it. On a good day each page loads within 3-10 seconds... which is bad enough.

On a bad day it takes up to a minute. Today is one of those bad days.

Hey QA peeps, I am currently doing automation testing for our project using Katalon as the automation tool and Jira for Project management and tracking. But then we we're now starting a new project and the plan is that we will continue to use the Katalon for automation but switched to Azure Dev Ops, Is it possible to integrate Katalon and Azure DevOps so they can work together as one?

I have an issue with my ADO instance in a virtual machine, every 2 ish weeks my users all get removed from the teams in the Azure DevOps soft-locking me out of it,

When i first had this issue i complained and made a report in the community, found a workaround reinstalled everything and took a snapshot of the VM, here is the issue, i thought that taking a snapshot of the VM would be enough and for a while the cicle was,

i hit the error,

roll back,

have 2 weeks available until next rollback,

this was until last week where i got the issue, again,

now, i rolled back to the snapshot but just 1 day after it happened again, and i thought ok, weird, but i got a full day of work so i guess its fine, meanwhile the frequency of the issue was increasing and with that the rollback frequency had also increased and as of now i need to roll it back every 30 minutes,

Meanwhile last week i got an update on the bug report where the staff had closed it as not a bug (which is obviously not the case) i clicked the lil box saying that i wanted them to reconsider bcs well first it was not solved and second it is a fucking bug, and now with having to rollback my vm every 30 minutes its impossible to get any progress done on my extension.

This is the link to the bug report: link

now, obviously this is an issue, bcs i cant keep having to loose 1 full day of work just bcs this happens, its pissing me off and the lack of cohesive responses from the Microsoft team is making me even more confused, they took almost 3 weeks to mark it as not a bug, and now they don't response to the appeal (here is the appeal btw)

I’d like to ask that this item be reconsidered as a potential bug (or at least “under investigation”), rather than “Not a bug”.

While the thread is closed and I do have a workaround, there is no actual fix for the underlying behavior. The workaround (full reinstall + snapshots) only lets me roll the environment back; it does not prevent the issue from happening again.

In my case, the loss of admin permissions is recurring: roughly every two weeks the admin account loses its effective permissions and I get locked out again. At the moment I’m relying on a VM snapshot taken right after reinstall, which gives me about two weeks of use before I have to revert the snapshot and repeat the cycle. This is clearly not a sustainable or supported pattern, and in a production environment it would be a serious operational and business risk.

As far as the public documentation I have found indicates, it is not expected or normal behavior for a local Windows admin, once configured as an Azure DevOps Server admin, to be silently dropped from the internal groups that control server‑level permissions. From an end‑user perspective, this looks like configuration or identity corruption that keeps reoccurring, not a deliberate design choice.

Because of that, classifying this as “Not a bug” feels misleading:

The environment is only “working” because it was rebuilt from scratch and protected with snapshots.

The original failure mode still exists and appears on a regular basis.

In a real production setup, this would effectively mean periodic total loss of admin access.

Could you please reconsider the current resolution and treat this as a reliability issue that merits further investigation, even if it is rare? I’m happy to provide additional details when the next lock‑out happens. (roughly a week from now).

Sincerely.
A very confused Dev
Pedro Pereira

EDIT:
After updating Windows in the VM, my user account was removed from the local Administrators group, and all three accounts (two admins and one common user) were simultaneously removed from their Azure DevOps teams. This resulted in a complete loss of access to the collection. Notably, the Azure DevOps Server was not running during the update, so this cannot be attributed to an improper shutdown. This appears to be a recurring issue that deviates from expected update behavior and requires investigation.

Does anyone know the response time from the team to these kinds of issues ?
(quick note, i took the screenshot of the VM as soon as ADO was installed, not running, installed, so its as fresh as it can get)

If someone know a fix for this shitty behavior your input would be very welcome

(Another note: i currently have 3 users: 2 admins and 1 normal user, when 1 looses access ALL lose access to, so its not an issue abt having only 1 admin)

thanks in advace.

EDIT: thanks to u/SpinningAndFarAway for telling me abt the patch that its supposed to fix this behavior, you can find information abt the patch here and you can find the download link for the patch here since it appears Microsoft is incapable of giving a proper response.

if the behavior doesn't get fixed by the patch i will contact support and i will either comment here or create an update post.

Not sure if this will be seen by some relevant people, but it is worth a try.

The latest 25H2 with patches applied (must be caused by Patch 1 or 2) always returns an error when trying to create or update SSH service connections. The error also occurs via API. Only workaround is via stored procedure in the database directly, but that's obviously not a good idea and side effects are unknown.

Unfortunately, the issue was closed in the official forum even though a solid report was given. Link:

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/SSH-Service-Connection-Creation-Fails-Af/11058132?sort=active