How to migrate from ARM templates to Bicep

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Looking to move from writing your Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates in JSON to Bicep? The good news is Microsoft have provided some tooling to make it relatively straightforward too migrate. 1. Run the Bicep command line interface (CLI) decompile command Before getting started with Bicep, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got the … Read more

Setup Azure DevOps organisational portfolio dashboards

Looking to setup Azure DevOps organisational dashboards? This is harder than it probably should be today. At present there’s no notion of cross-project widgets or organisational status views. There is a user feedback request, but it has been ‘under consideration’ for years. In leu of that, here are some options for getting a view of … Read more

Getting started with Azure Bicep

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Bicep is a new language from Microsoft that allows you to easily specify your Azure infrastructure as code. It’s an improvement on writing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates directly by better supporting features such as type safety and code modularity and reuse. That said, Bicep still has a very close relationship with ARM templates. In … Read more

How to fix Azure DevOps library group permission errors

Are you trying to edit a variable group in an Azure DevOps Library, and getting the error “you do not have permission to create a variable group within library“? Continue on to find out how to rectify this issue. The problem Variable groups within Azure DevOps can have different permissions to your project settings. This … Read more

Azure DevOps system variables now read-only

Azure DevOps provides a number of predefined system variables out of the box on hosted build agents. While these have officially always been read-only, informally you’ve previously been able to change the value of a predefined system variable by overwriting it in a pipeline task. However, as of the January 28 2020 DevOps release this … Read more