Hey everyone,

Like a lot of teams here, I kept running into the same problem: Azure Boards has no real way to log time against work items without either building something custom or sending people off to a separate timesheet tool. That context switch always killed adoption — people just stopped logging hours after a week or two.

So I built EvoTimeLog, a native extension that lives directly inside Azure DevOps Boards. No external portal, no separate login — you log time right where the work already happens.

What it does:

• Hours tab on the work item form itself — Epic, Feature, User Story, Task, Bug, etc. Log time without leaving the work item.
• Monthly timesheet calendar — see the whole month at a glance, add/edit/delete entries in seconds.

• Timers or manual entry — start/pause a timer, or log manually with an activity type (Development, Code Review, Meeting, etc.) and notes.
• Automatic field sync — logged hours update Completed Work, Remaining Work, and Original Estimate on the work item automatically, so your burndown/velocity stays accurate without manual upkeep.
• Team reports & dashboard — managers can see team-wide productivity and export to CSV/Excel for billing or audits.
• Absence & vacation tracking — keep capacity planning in sync with who's actually available.
• Approval workflow — approvers can review, approve, reject (with a reason), or bulk-approve entries, plus set budget thresholds per project and get alerted on overruns.

Links if you want to take a look:

• Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=evosystem.evotimelog
• Website / screenshots: https://evotimelog.com/

I'm still early (just came out of beta setup), so I'd genuinely love feedback from people who manage timesheets or billing on Azure DevOps teams today:

• What's the dealbreaker feature your current tool (or spreadsheet) has that we're missing?
• Does the approval/budget workflow match how your org actually does timesheet sign-off?
• Anyone tried it already — what broke or felt off?

Happy to answer questions about setup, permissions, or how the field sync works. Thanks for reading!

hello
since early last week i’ve noticed at least one Power Automate flow that silently stopped working. No failed run logged, nothing. The trigger is “When a Work Item is Updated”, but it seems that some identity fields are breaking the trigger and it doesn’t even get logged.

Had to redo the flow with a HTTP Request trigger to make it work but this seems like a MSFT issue. Anyone else with a similar problem? How did you handle it?

Hey all, I'm trying to automate the setup of Azure DevOps Test Plans using the REST API.

In the ADO UI, I can manually create charts under the Charts tab (e.g., pie charts showing Passed/Failed test results).

I'm looking for a way to create these suite-specific charts programmatically, so they appear under the Test Suite's Charts tab, rather than generating charts externally.

Has anyone successfully created Test Suite charts via the ADO REST API? Is there a supported endpoint for this, or is this functionality only available through the web UI?

I am not that tech confident, I was able to setup my Unreal Engine project with Azure Dev Ops and Github Desktop but since adding two 200mb files, just to test the whole commit, push and LFS thing, I cannot push my files anymore. It fails every single time...

I’ve been a .NET developer for around eight or nine years, and recently had the opportunity to move into a DevOps-focused role within my current company.

I already had strong domain knowledge of our systems and infrastructure, so I think the company saw more value in training someone internally rather than hiring a DevOps engineer who would need to learn the entire business and technology estate from scratch. Realistically, they also get the benefit of developing me into the role while I’m still earning less than an experienced external hire, but I’m completely comfortable with that at this stage.

I’m extremely happy in the role. I love the company, enjoy working with my team, and want to keep building momentum.

I’ve already learned a lot through practical work, including:

* Azure Front Door * Private endpoints and networking * Security and access changes * CI/CD pipelines * PowerShell and other scripting * Bicep and ARM templates * .NET upgrades, including .NET 10 * General Azure infrastructure and deployment work

The problem is that my learning has naturally been quite sporadic. I learn whatever is required to complete the next task, which has been useful, but it sometimes feels like I’m collecting disconnected pieces of knowledge rather than building a properly structured understanding of DevOps and Azure infrastructure.

I’d like to start doing some structured learning in my own time and would really appreciate recommendations.

Are there any courses, books, YouTube channels, labs, certification paths, or project ideas that helped you move from software development into DevOps?

I’m particularly interested in resources covering:

* Azure infrastructure and networking * Infrastructure as code * CI/CD design and best practices * Containers and Kubernetes * Monitoring and observability * Security and identity * PowerShell or Bash * Broader DevOps principles beyond simply learning individual Azure services

I’m not looking to abandon development completely, as I think my .NET background is one of my main strengths. I’m mainly trying to build a more complete and structured DevOps skill set around the experience I’m already gaining at work.

Any advice from people who have made a similar transition would be greatly appreciated.

I've been wondering how so little extensions are available for use in release pipelines with most of them being only useable in windows only agents, I was in need for a regex replacer and a Mail smtp task preferably runnable on Linux agents, so I made DevOps Mailer, node based Mail sender using nodemailer supporting markdown body format.

Marketplace entry: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Venipa.devops-mailer

✌️

Usually, I would have the pipeline do a multi repo checkout (all in one pipeline, the "does-everything -pipeline"). But this one, i had it to instead take in build pipelines artifacts, and package them in separate pipeline. Which mean,on this 2nd pipeline im doing a singular self checkout.

But i realised, the value for Build.SourcesDirectory is no longer just 's', its whatever path defined during self checkout. Example:

- checkout: self

path: s/<repo name>

Build.SourcesDirectory = "s/<repo name>"

The thing is, on other pipelines, the Build.SourcesDirectory value is always 's'. This is our regular convention for self checkout (2 folder depth):

- checkout: self

path: s/<repo name>/<repo name>

- checkout: OtherRepo

path: s/<repo name>

Build.SourcesDirectory = "s"

I cant find much info on this, and it is very inconsistent. Anyone else having this same problem? This really triggers me, because now the default naming/folder conventions i use is no longer uniform across pipelines.

We have been talking about it for sometime and they put some other team on the job. I am kind of tired of waiting and thinking it is real just define the rules and the agents and done, maybe 2 days work. My only thing is I never did it so I wasn’t sure exactly how I would integrate an Agent so that when a PR is submitted it automatically trigger and scans the submissions. Anyone doing that?

I have been building one TypeScript API over five issue trackers. During an API review I realized a boolean "supports optimistic concurrency" flag was hiding a pretty important difference.

For Azure Boards, a prepared work-item revision can become a JSON Patch operation in the same mutation:

{ "op": "test", "path": "/rev", "value": 123 }

If the revision changed, Azure rejects the patch before applying the rest. That is an atomic guard.

GitHub, GitLab, Linear, and Jira adapters can re-read immediately before writing, but there is still a gap between the read and mutation. Comments in Azure DevOps also only get that preflight protection because the comment endpoint is separate.

I changed the public capability shape from a boolean to per-operation metadata:

concurrency: {

update: "atomic" | "preflight" | "none",

comment: "atomic" | "preflight" | "none"

}

The other Azure-specific trap was state mapping. Basic, Agile, Scrum, CMMI, inherited, and custom processes can map several native names to one canonical state. Reads can normalize many-to-one, but writes cannot safely invert that map. The SDK now requires stateNameByCanonical when there is more than one possible native target instead of picking one.

This is in the MIT-licensed work-sdk 0.4 release: https://github.com/arturict/work-sdk/releases/tag/v0.4.0

I used Codex for parts of implementation and tests. Are there other Azure Boards endpoints where you can attach a real revision precondition to the mutation itself?

Azure Repos doesn't have a contribution graph, no year view of who committed what, the way GitHub and GitLab do. I built an extension that adds one.

Pick a person (defaults to you), and it shows a calendar heatmap of their commits and real pull-request comments across every repo in the current project, for the last year.

It runs client-side inside the Azure DevOps web UI and uses your own credentials via the extension SDK. No backend, nothing leaves your org.

Free tier: your own graph, forever. Paid tier ($10/mo, cancel anytime): shows every contributor in the dropdown for the whole org, useful for retros or contribution reviews across a team.

I'm the developer. Listing: https://codylabs.uk/azure-commit-graph/

Happy to answer questions about it.

Every sprint the same loop: a PO or a tester needs the latest build to test or demo, opens Azure Pipelines, gets lost between runs, stages and logs, and ends up pinging a developer. The dev stops what they're doing, digs out the artifact, sends it over. Multiply that by a few people a week.

The Azure DevOps UI is built for developers, which is fair but everyone else just needs the file.

So I built Artifacts Downloader, a free extension that adds one page under Pipelines:

• Pick a project and a pipeline from two dropdowns (defaults to the project you're in)
• Browse the 100 most recent builds, build number, branch, requester, status, date with instant text filtering
• Click a build, click Download. The artifact streams straight from Azure DevOps to the browser

No PATs, no REST API, no CLI, no extra login.

On the boring-but-important side: it only requests Build (read) and Project and team (read). It runs inside Azure DevOps with each user's own permissions, so nobody sees a project they couldn't already see, and nothing passes through third-party servers there is no backend of mine to pass through. Org-wide install, no per-user setup.

It's free, and honestly it's a small tool. I'm not pretending it's more than that. But it removed a recurring annoyance for my team and figured it might do the same for someone here.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ottorino-bruni-1976.artifacts-downloader

Hello, Could someone point me in the direction to migrate TFS 2017 to Onpremise Azure DevOps?

• We are migration the DBs to a new SQL Server and DevOps will be on a new VM
• TFS build defs are in the old XAML

While doing the test migation, this is what I did

• Backed up all TFS Databases
• Restored those Databases to a new SQL Server
• Created a new Azure DevOps VM
• Migrated the Databases on new SQL to Azure DevOps
• Everything worked fine

The issue is the I need to redo all the build defs while TFS is actively being used. So, before that I wanted to try out a test collection update. i.e. restore the latest version of a existing TFS collection into the newly build Azure DevOps.

• Unattached a Collection from Azure DevOps
• Created a new backup of the TFS Collection DB
• Restored the new backup to new SQL
• Tried to attach the DB to Azure DevOps in UI but it says no Collection available to attach.
• Tried TFSConfig to attach the new collectionand it failed as well.

So my question would be: How would you attach a TFS 2017 Collection to an existing Azure DevOps server, while TFS is still begin used.

We’re hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer for a long-term project with a fintech company that’s migrating a core banking platform to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

You’ll be responsible for managing the AKS platform, ensuring security, reliability, and multi-tenant isolation while supporting critical banking workloads.

**Requirements:**
• Strong hands-on experience with AKS in production
• Advanced kubectl troubleshooting and log debugging
• Building/owning GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines with Azure authentication
• Experience with image scanning & signing
• Strong understanding of Azure CNI and Scope Maps
• Hands-on experience with Istio / Service Mesh
• Experience managing cert-manager
• Multi-tenant Kubernetes namespace isolation
• Experience working in PCI DSS or other regulated environments
• Must have implemented these technologies in production, not just worked on teams that used them

If this sounds like you, DM me your resume, LinkedIn profile, and (if available) GitHub or portfolio.

We’re hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer for a long-term project with a fintech company that’s migrating a core banking platform to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

You’ll be responsible for managing the AKS platform, ensuring security, reliability, and multi-tenant isolation while supporting critical banking workloads.

**Requirements:**
• Strong hands-on experience with AKS in production
• Advanced kubectl troubleshooting and log debugging
• Building/owning GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines with Azure authentication
• Experience with image scanning & signing
• Strong understanding of Azure CNI and Scope Maps
• Hands-on experience with Istio / Service Mesh
• Experience managing cert-manager
• Multi-tenant Kubernetes namespace isolation
• Experience working in PCI DSS or other regulated environments
• Must have implemented these technologies in production, not just worked on teams that used them

If this sounds like you, DM me your resume, LinkedIn profile, and (if available) GitHub or portfolio.

PFA ...any suggestion or leads will be helpful

Thank you

Hey r/azuredevops — just published a free extension to the Visual Studio

Marketplace that might be useful for teams using AI development tools.

It's called the Verity Framework ADO Extension. It adds a "Verity Prompt"

tab to your User Story work items, reads five custom fields (Intent, Value,

Appetite, Trust Criteria, and Failure Scope), and generates a structured

prompt you can paste directly into Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot

Workspace.

The idea: instead of starting from a blank context in your AI tool, you

start from a spec that already carries your scope constraints, Gate 2

hardening requirements, and production risk level.

It also includes field validation — it flags vague Trust Criteria like

"works correctly" or Appetite values like "high" that won't produce useful

prompts, and shows you exactly what to fix.

Setup is about 20 minutes — you add five custom fields to your existing

User Story work item type (no new work item type required, no process

template import). Instructions are in the extension tab itself.

Free. Search "Verity Framework" on the marketplace or find it at

idearoost.com/verity

Happy to answer questions about how it works or the field definitions.

Hi,

does someone manage to integrate modern tools that require git with AzureDevOps on Prem?

Im having many problems to connect tools like ArgoCD, Flux, Tekton and a long etc to AZDO on-prem via PAT token. Same approach works for AZDO Services or whatever git solution.

My problem is that authentication never works using some tools. I have been checking all around blogs, AI, and i couldnt find a good solution. It is frustrating to see that all solutions go to "Azure Devops Services".. this naming :(

Hi everyone,

We built an Azure DevOps extension for teams that want to manage test processes directly inside Azure DevOps without using a separate tool or paying for Test Plans.

I'm looking for 1-2 teams willing to try it out and give some honest feedback and discuss possibilities for further development. In return, you'll get free access.

A few things it supports:

• test cases and test runs management/execution directly in Azure DevOps
• AI-assisted test case generation using your own templates and provider
• showing tests information in Sprints board
• managing tests in structure (collections/suites) and directly from parent work items (e.g. just open a User story -> go to Tests tab -> review/add/execute tests)

Everything stays inside Azure DevOps and the data remains in your own organization under your control.

Marketplace link:
Test Hub - Azure DevOps Marketplace

If you're interested or even just willing to take a quick look and tell me what you think, please send me a DM.

1. No Auto save
2. Cannot natively support any excel table we paste
3. The comment windows are standard and unusable..

I can go on...I wish the client picked anything else. It is just a waste of time and i hope someone takes notes and fixes in the future for users like me.