Azure DevOps - historical graph for agent pools (Preview)

If you want to catch up with all features/improvements released  on Azure DevOps - you can take a look at the Azure DevOps Feature timeline. One of the cool features which went in preview in December 2020 is the historical graph for agent pools (Preview) - which is extremely useful if you are working with a large team of developers and you need to know whether you need to add additional build agents. Microsoft recently updated the documentation on Historical graph for agent pools (Preview) | Microsoft Docs .

References:

• Parallel jobs in Azure DevOps
• Historical graph for agent pools (Preview) | Microsoft Docs
• Implement a pipeline strategy (Microsoft Learn)

Using a personal access token in Postman to query the Azure DevOps Services REST API

If you want to query the Azure DevOps Services Rest API you first need to be authenticated. The easiest way to do this is to generate a Personal Access Token. If you want to use this token in Postman to authenticate you will need to use Basic authentication, leave the username blank and copy the token in the password input box.

Generating Azure Application Insight Key in Azure DevOps pipeline

If you want to generate an Application Insights key in your Azure DevOps pipeline - you can use the the PowerShell code snippet below in a Azure PowerShell task.

Look at Automate Azure Application Insight resources using PowerShell and New-AzureRmApplicationInsightsKeyApiKey for more details.

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Install-Module AzureRM.ApplicationInsights -force -verbose -scope CurrentUser Import-Module AzureRM.ApplicationInsights $resourcegroupname ='rg_func****' $aicomponentname ='func****' $permissions = @("ReadTelemetry", "WriteAnnotations") $apikeydescription = 'testapikey' New-AzureRmApplicationInsightsApiKey -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroupname -Name $aicomponentname -Description $apikeydescription -Permissions $permissions

My perspective on the PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps

Mid July 2019 Microsoft released a preview of a set of PowerApps specific Azure DevOps Build tasks.  In the last months this tooling has been updated on a quite regular pace which indicates that  ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) for Power Platform (and Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Service/etc..) is high on the priority list for Microsoft.

For those of you who are new to Azure DevOps, here is a small summary. Azure DevOps is a set of services hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud which support your full software development lifecycle  e.g. you can use Azure Boards for work tracking and backlogs, Azure Pipelines for  CI/CD, Azure Repos for source control, and much more.  Azure DevOps is successor to  Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and the best thing of all you can get started with it for free. (For more details see Pricing for Azure DevOps). You can start learning Azure DevOps by exploring the Azure DevOps Hands-On Labs

In the past most Dynamics 365 CE consultants largely relied on a BYOALM (Bring Your Own ALM) approach meaning that you need a combination of PowerShell script, SDK extensions, etc … to automate the build and release of Dynamics components. I even think that in the majority of cases there is no fully automated build and release process in place - meaning that a deployment relies on a number of (hopefully documented) manual steps.  In one of the projects I recently worked on - we have been using the excellent Dynamics 365 Build Tools for Azure DevOps from Wael Haemze so there are other extensions available for Azure DevOps as well.

After you have installed the PowerApps Build Tools you will see a whole set of build and release tasks that you can use in your build and release pipelines. To explore the possibilities you can start with the PowerApps Build tools for Azure DevOps Hands On Lab files which contains a walk through of the different scenarios like for example using the PowerApps Solution Checker (see reference section for more information on this)

If you compare the PowerApps Build Tools with the Dynamics 365 Build Tools, you will probably see that Dynamics 365 Build Tools currently still offers more capabilities but it does seem worthwhile to start exploring the newly released Microsoft tooling.  I recently also got feedback within the context of a Microsoft support case that they recommended to use the new PowerApps build tooling because they would not troubleshoot issues with other extensions on top of Azure DevOps in combination with Dynamics 365.

I  also expect more information to come available in the coming weeks as we are getting closer to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 1 . In the meanwhile I will be sharing more information in some upcoming blog posts.

References:

• Announcement: automate your application lifecycle management (ALM) with PowerApps  Build Tools (Preview)
• PowerApps Build tools for Azure DevOps Hands On Lab files
• PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps Overview (Microsoft docs)
• Introducing the PowerApps Checker PowerShell module to check PowerApps solution quality 
• General availability of PowerApps Solution checker makes it easier to check Dynamics 365 solution quality
• Ignite 2019 sessionon ALM/DevOps for Dynamics 365 - Azure DevOps for Power Platform ISVs:Automate ISV solution deployments and release regular upgrades and patches toall customers concurrently by @MimCRM