r/azuredevops

I will start with this, I'm not a Cloud Engineer. I'm a junior SDE. Never worked on Azure (used Azure Repos and Azure Pipeline here and there once). recruiter said that it will be an hour long pure-technical interview. I am going through John Savill's Azure Masterclass for now but have no idea what will be asked and this masterclass is not enough to answer in-depth.

JD had AZ-104 and AZ-204 listed. Can anyone guide me what should I do and what kind of questions should I expect?

Anyone else done the push -> wait 8 minutes -> red X -> change one character -> push again dance, just to figure out why condition: and(succeeded(), eq(variables['Build.Reason'], 'PullRequest')) isn't doing what you think it's doing? And then half the time you need an actual PR + approval just to touch the yml, so testing "let me just try this real quick" means pinging a teammate for the third time that week going "sorry, one more approval, promise this is the last one" (it is never the last one).

So I built pipcondition - a local simulator for Azure Pipelines condition, expressions and dependsOn graphs. You paste your real azure-pipelines.yml in, mock whatever variables/parameters/step outcomes you want, and it shows you exactly which stages/jobs/steps would run, skip, or fail. No push, no pipeline run, no waiting.

What it actually does:

- The real condition expression language - eq, ne, in, and/or/not, succeeded()/failed()/succeededOrFailed(), counter(), all of it - not some 80%-there approximation

- dependsOn fan-out/fan-in across stages and jobs, with the actual skip-propagation rules Azure uses (fail one stage, watch everything downstream correctly cascade to Skipped)

- A "simulate a branch push" panel - type in Feature/my-cool-thing or release/2.0, pick Manual/PR/Schedule as the trigger, and it derives Build.SourceBranch, Build.SourceBranchName, System.PullRequest.* etc. so your branch-gated stages actually flip between skip/run correctly (yes it even replicates the "PR builds get a fake refs/pull/N/merge ref" nonsense, because that's genuinely how Azure behaves and I'd rather be accurate than friendly)

- Templates, extends:, typed parameters, the ${{ if/each }} compile-time stuff

- Mock step outcomes so you can pretend a step failed and see if your continueOnError/condition logic actually saves you like you think it does

- A visual stage/job DAG instead of reading yaml top to bottom like a maniac

- If your pipeline references a variable group or a cross-repo template it obviously can't reach (it's a local tool, it's not calling your actual org), it just tells you "can't see this, treating as empty" instead of exploding

It's here, https://pipcondition.vercel.app/ (paste and go, nothing to install), code's on GitHub: https://www.github.com/WasathTheekshana/pipcondition

Heads up - this is very much a beta, built in my spare time by one guy who also does this stuff for a day job. It WILL have bugs, especially on weirder real-world patterns (nested templates, exotic variable setups, whatever creative yaml your pipelines team wrote three years ago that everyone's now too scared to touch). If you paste your pipeline in and it either explodes or gives you a flat-out wrong answer, please open an issue - the more real pipelines this gets thrown at, the better it gets. PRs welcome too if you enjoy yaml pain as much as I apparently do.

I already have the Azure DevOps Demo Generator projects but these are getting painfully old and are a little more complex to install now that the service isn't in place.

Are there any more modern Azure Devops demo projects? Hopefully they will include multiple aspects of Azure Devops features, not just a repository.

thanks!

Hi everyone,
So i m looking into migration from TFS 2013 to ADO and wanted to hear from this who have already been through it.
What caught you off guard during this migration?
Was it custom process templates, build/release pipelines, permissions, test data, reporting, or something else? What ended up taking much longer than you expected? If you could do it again, what would you plan differently?
Did you stick with Microsoft's migration tools, use a third-party tool, or build your own migration process?
I'd especially love to hear experiences from TFS 2013 migrations, but any migration story is welcome.

Wrote a small article on running self-hosted Azure DevOps agents as Azure Container Apps Jobs:

https://github.com/groovy-sky/azure/tree/master/devops-docker-build-01#introduction

The setup lets agents start only when pipeline work is queued, instead of keeping VM/Container running all the time.

so i lead a small dev team thats all on azure devops and ive been staring at our own process lately trying to figure out where all the time actually goes between a story hitting the backlog and it being implemented and merged

curious how other teams deal with it. like what does that path actually look like for you in practice? and where does the time go, is it the boring well defined stories or the genuinely hard ones?

also have you tried anything to speed it up (copilot, random scripts, some tool) and did it actually stick, or did everyone quietly go back to doing it by hand

i‘m new to this role as a product owner and just tryingto figure out if this annoys everyone or just us lol.

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.

So the task I have is about automation and I need to automate email reading and downloading attachments (PDFs etc) which are sent to a particular Outlook mail. And the downloaded PDFs must be uploaded into a particular folder for which I will give the path in the script (for this I wrote python script in VS Code).

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The main thing is the PDFs we get to the Outlook mail will be purchase orders from vendors and we need to extract data from the PDFs and convert it into Excel file. That's the task and I used Pdfplumber and pandas for the extraction and creating an excel sheet for each particular pdf.

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The main concern is that is it safe for using this to create and app registration so that I can get the client id for automation of the Outlook mail reading and downloading.

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?