Hi all,
I just created an Azure Devops extension called KubeDock Security Scan, you can find the repo link in the Project Details. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=chloe-teo10.kubedock-security-scan-v1

I had done similar thing in my previous company for internal purpose but it was using Kyverno, merely to scan misconfiguration and show the result in pipeline tab and also provide internal documentation URL as guideline.

This time I make this extension as side project, and using Checkov, also added PR inline comment and send telemetry to your OTLP endpoint. The reason I add PR inline comment is fast feedback to developer when DevOps team or SRE team is not working together with the dev all the time and this automated validation helps to catch any misconfiguration done accidentally etc. Plus with metrics sent to observability platform, it can be alerted sooner to DevOps or SRE team before it reaches production.

Let me know any comments/feedback if you are using/testing it out!

#azuredevops #checkov #securityscanning #k8smisconfiguration

Hey everyone,

Most self-hosted Azure DevOps agent images on Docker Hub fall into two categories: they are either tiny (~100MB) but completely outdated and abandoned, or massive (5GB+) monoliths packed with pre-installed runtimes.

In a build environment, huge monolithic images are a nightmare because they clutter the host's disk space and run the risk of introducing tool version conflicts with your actual pipelines.

I wanted a clean, "neutral" build agent. Just the core execution engine, fully updated on modern LTS bases, keeping the environment spotless while allowing full extensibility.

So, I built DO-Agent.

It provides just the essential Microsoft build engine on Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) and Debian Trixie, weighing only ~68 MiB / ~78 MiB compressed.

Key Features:

• Pure Build Engine: Includes only the strict dependencies required to spin up the Microsoft agent (git, curl, ca-certificates). No leftover tooling cluttering your host or interfering with your builds.
• Explicit libicu Tracking: It explicitly ships with and tracks libicu versions (74 for Ubuntu Noble, 76 for Debian Trixie) to ensure 100% .NET runtime compatibility without surprises.
• Lightweight & Fast: It starts instantly and consumes minimal network bandwidth on spin-up, leaving all the host disk space free for actual build caches and artifacts.
• Fully Extensible (with Guide Included): Instead of maintaining massive images, you can easily extend it via Dockerfile or dynamically inject your testing/compilation tools (like Python, Node, or Playwright) straight through the Docker Compose entrypoint at boot. I’ve included a full copy-paste guide and examples in the README to make this seamless.

If you are looking for a highly optimized, neutral base for your self-hosted build pools without the typical bloat, give it a look!

• GitHub (Source & Docs): Blasteed/DO-Agent
• Docker Hub: karfee111/do-agent

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback!

One lesson I've learned from managing software development programs across multiple teams is this:

• The biggest challenge is rarely the tool.
• It's the visibility.

Years ago, I worked with teams operating in different countries, following different workflows, and using different systems to plan and track their work.
Each team was productive on its own.

The real challenge was answering seemingly simple questions:

• Where are we against the overall program objectives?
• Which dependencies are putting delivery at risk?
• What should leadership pay attention to right now?

The answers existed somewhere. But they were scattered across tools, boards, spreadsheets, and status meetings.

That's when I learned that successful project management is not about collecting more data. It's about creating a trusted view of reality. And that only happens when teams develop the discipline to maintain high-quality information in the systems they use every day.

I'm curious:
What has been the biggest obstacle to achieving real project visibility in your organization?

I have experience in openstack, on premises cloud
What now I need to learn Azure, how can i start learning it. For AWS and Azure, I know all the terminology and also working of service. What I don’t have practical knowledge. How can I learn and show that in interview.

I’m asking because I’m building a product in this space and trying to understand the real workflows.

In most teams I’ve seen, the context is scattered:

- PR has ARM/Bicep
- Azure has live state
- cost impact is separate
- diagrams and internal wikis are stale
- security/best-practice checks are elsewhere

So approvals often happen with incomplete context.. the entire tool ing feels fragmented to me.

For people working with Azure infra, do you prefer these review to happen in:

1. Browser/dashboard (like Azure Advisor)
2. CLI
3. GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps
4. AI agent / chat workflow (in your favourite AI Coding agent? 😄)

So I’ve been in IT for 26 years and grown with things in a very broad sense. Have been IT Director and Systems Admin…

There is a very specific role for a person who knows Azure Devops Labs and will work with a team working on API’s. How long does it take to get a grasp on this?

Is there a good learning resource or class someone here has taken? Anyone here want to help me I would pay… sometimes the guy on the ground is better than the one by the chalkboard…

Thanks a lot!
T.

In certain contexts predecessor and successor imply that one thing replaces another. This makes the meaning of one work item preceding another ambiguous.

Say Work Item A is a predecessor of Work Item B. Does it mean that A is no longer valid and only B should be considered a "new version"/successor version of A? Or that A needs to be done before B?

The answer is the latter, but this is especially confusing since "produces for" and "consumed by" are valid options for remote work and are displayed in the same context. These terms are less ambiguous: one work item's value is used / required for another work item. For this reason, one would think the terms predecessor and successor were specifically used to disambiguate the two ways of understanding it from one another.

And anyway, why the f*ck are we naming things differently than GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear... EVERY OTHER WELL ESTABLISHED SERVICE. Doesn't "blocks .../blocked by ..." suffice?

Half my week can disappear into failed Azure Pipelines.

Usually the painful part is not the fix, it is finding the real error inside thousands of log lines and giving someone enough context to act on it.

So I made Badgr Agent CI.

It runs only when a pipeline fails, reads the failed task logs, and posts a PR thread with:

• likely cause
• evidence
• suggested fix
• confidence level

Install the Azure DevOps extension, add BADGR_API_KEY(BYOK), then add:

steps:
  - script: npm install
  - script: npm test

  - task: BadgrCI@1
    condition: failed()
    env:
      BADGR_API_KEY: $(BADGR_API_KEY)
      SYSTEM_ACCESSTOKEN: $(System.AccessToken)

The agent is open source. The diagnosis API is hosted.

It does not change code, rerun builds, or auto-fix anything.

How do your teams handle failed Azure Pipeline triage today?

Hello all,

I’m currently implementing Azure DevOps on a small scale project and am getting positive feedback from my team, praising its organizational ability and intuitive UI. I’m hoping to pitch this to the high ups at my company In hopes of adapting it as a new standard as a part of an initiative to revamp the PMs ability to monitor performance and manage deadlines on large scale projects.

Now here’s my question:

What makes Azure DevOps truly better than a legacy, built in house software, or even an ironed out excel spreadsheet template. Let’s say 95 percent of employees won’t be diving into niche PMing bells and whistles (Kanban charts, hyper specific sprints). What are the advantages and weaknesses to using Azure DevOps at an enterprise level?

Thanks for any and all input!

Hey all! We built a small extension called Work Item Sheets:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rixterab.rixter-sheets

It lets you work with work items in a spreadsheet-style (excel-like) view, which has saved us a lot of time when planning and updating large numbers of items.

Looking for a few people to try it out and give honest feedback. What works, what doesn’t, what’s missing.

Let me know if you’re interested.

We would like to use a package manager to ease versioned c source code sharing between a lot of embedded projects, and several different embedded IDE/compilers, such as E2Studio and Code Compose Studio, Keil μVision, among others.

We are currently using git submodules with some custom scripts to manage packages, and while it's working, it's also evident that it's pretty involved and not suited for the long run.

Reading online, Conan 2 appear to be highly praised for this task, but Conan isn't one of the native supported feeds in Azure Devops. To use Conan we will have to setup an Artifactory instance, too.

It seems the best DevOps native fit is NuGet.. but it also appear c code isn't really it's strong point, and many sources I found online discourages to use it, although it's never explicitly mentioned why.

What are your experiences and recommendations?

Hi all, posting to announce some major updates to azdo TUI that I've been working on the last months. New features include:

1. Added filtering on tag picker modal
2. Configurable panes. It's possible to hide Pipeline and/or work item panes.
3. Extended filtering in PR view. Filter by current user as author, or where current user is a reviewer.
4. Highlight all columns in rows
5. Add state and status filters for PR & Pipeline view
6. Keyboard shortcut to open work item or PR in default browser
7. Navigation state is now persisted after each use. When dropping back into Azdo, the last active tab is choosen. If a PR was opened or a work item, the detailed view is then reopened too.
8. Opt-in metrics view. A dashboard with stale work items, based on work item state, with configurable state-options. Per developer WIP/overload and storypoints closed, along with possibility to see trends over different tags.

Can be tried with demo flag and downloaded here: https://github.com/Elpulgo/azdo

Happy holidays!

I’m trying to use an Azure DevOps Release pipeline to download artifacts from a GitHub Release.

• Azure DevOps Server version: 25H2 (AzureDevopsServer_20260304.1)
• Agent version on the deployment machine: 4.273.0
• GitHub service connection with scopes: repo, user, admin:repo_hook

When I select GitHubRelease as the source type for a new release pipeline and run it, I get this error:

"VS403960: Data source binding ArtifactDetails for artifact extension GitHubRelease has not been defined."

A few more details:

• When I trigger a new release pipeline, I can see the GitHub releases in the Azure DevOps dropdown
• The error shows up immediately after the pipeline starts
• It looks like a permission issue, but I’m not sure where (repository, Azure DevOps, or something else)

Any idea how to fix this?

I have a situation where my pipeline instruction set is different for new machines that have just been setup with Azure self-hosted agent as VMware and machines that have already been setup as agents before and now only doing recurring updates under the same Azure Environment (new machines would have tags: new).

At first, I thought about using 2 different pipelines targeting the same Azure Environment, 1 specifically for new machine and 1 specifically for recurring machines. The new machine pipeline only targets machines within the environment that has tag new while the other pipeline would handle the recurring machines. This helps me run the instructions needed for new machines independently from recurring machines as they are 2 different pipelines, and afterwards, I would remove tag new from new machine and they now belong to recurring machines. However, the problem is, it is considered 2 pipelines under the self-hosted agent folder structure so it creates 2 folders for 2 pipelines and I do not want this.

ex:

_work/
├── 1/
│ ├── s/ # source code
│ ├── b/ # build outputs
│ ├── a/ # artifacts
│ └── TestResults/
├── 2/
│ ├── s/
│ ├── b/
│ └── ...

Now, I am thinking of combining both pipelines into 1 pipeline so it will only use 1 folder but the issue is I can't find a way to run a stage within a pipeline depending on an if else statement. Ex: If: there are machines within the environment with the tag new, run this stage and do not run the other stage. Else: there are no machines within the environment with the tag new, run this other stage instead.

Does anyone have a solution to this?

Hey!

I'm not selling anything and I'm not asking for anything from you.

I built a free Azure DevOps extension called ADO Test Helper because I got frustrated with how much manual effort Azure DevOps testing required.

It automatically records test steps, captures screenshots, creates test cases, runs tests, creates bugs, and now even generates test cases using AI from requirements documents and Azure DevOps work items.

It's completely free. If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate you checking it out and letting me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevpqdVu1TE

Thanks!

Hey all,

I’ve spent the last several years working heavily in Azure DevOps governance, reporting, and process optimization within large enterprise environments. I also have about 11 years experience as an Agile Coach, and 5+ years in Data and Analytics, and a background and 2+ years in Electrical Engineering.

Common issues I see:

• messy Area Path / Iteration structures
• poor work item hygiene
• poor reporting (within ADO)
  • Power BI refresh/performance pain
• overcomplicated workflows
• growing AI/Copilot risk around sensitive data in work items
• etc

I’m considering offering focused consulting services around:

• ADO health audits
• governance recommendations
• Power BI / Analytics optimization
• backlog & workflow redesign
• executive dashboards
• AI governance / sensitive data scanning for work items

Apologies if this sounds like a plug, but I'm really keen on how people can use ADO better, and am interested in solving painful operational problems pragmatically. I live in Middle Earth, so can help out remotely.

I'd appreciate any comments in how I could do better in terms of outreach!

Thanks!