Azure Pipelines–Consolidate all build output in one folder

Today I was working at a customer who was still using Team Foundation Server 2013(!) and the XAML build feature. We are helping them to move away (finally) from this very old version and bring them to Azure DevOps Server 2022.

The migration itself went quite smoothly. We had to do an upgrade first to TFS 2015 but from there we could directly upgrade to Azure DevOps Server 2022. Great work from the team at Microsoft that created the Upgrade Wizard. I can only imagine what a challenge it was to create an upgrade process that works for so many versions.

That being said it was not yet the end of our journey because we also had to reverse engineer and migrate all XAML builds to the new task based Azure Pipelines. We decided to first migrate the builds ‘as-is’. One (small?) difference between the XAML builds and the new build system is that the XAML build puts the build output for all projects in the same folder.

How can we mimic this behavior using the newer build system?

The first thing we need to do is use the Build task to compile our solution and configure the output path. This can be done by setting the OutputPath property:

Now we can publish the generated artifacts from this one location using the Publish Artifacts task:

That did it for us!

Remark: I hope that I never need this information again as I had to re-experience the pain of using the XAML builds. Never again please!

More information

Upgrade your deployment - Azure DevOps Server & TFS | Microsoft Learn

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

The art of simplicity

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