A colleague contacted me with the following question; he tried to run a specific Azure Pipelines build but before even one build task could be executed, the build failed.
I asked him to send me the logs and he shared the following screenshot:
As you can see the build fails in the ‘Job initialization’ phase while downloading a specifc task ‘VersionAssemblies’.
The strange this was than when I searched for this build task I couldn’t find it between the list of installed extensions on the Azure DevOps server.
I took a look at the Azure DevOps marketplace and even there this specific build task was non-existent. Strange!
At least this explained the error message I got, as the build pipeline probably couldn’t find the task either.
In the end I fixed it by introducing an alternative build task that achieved the same goal(updating the AssemblyInfo with a build number).