..read more

Today I was trying to download an 11 GB zipped folder from a service at work over VPN. From the browser, the URI I had for the download would make it about 1 or 2 GB into the download and fail. It would keep failing for a while, even if I “resumed” the download. Then, I remembered dealing with this while working between remote sites in a previous role. I used the BitsTransfer PowerShell module. This module uses the Background Intelligent Transfer service to manage uploads or downloads that may be disconnected, suspended, and resumed. (It’s what Windows Update uses to download updates for exa ..read more

I was minding my own business, when Donovan Brown (twitter, blog) DM’d me on Microsoft Teams to ask for a second pair of eyes to troubleshoot a test case that was failing. The tests were for a command in the VSTeam module. There were three tests in a Context block. Each test had a Mock inside of their It block. The exact tests didn’t matter so much, but I’ve included them below to give you an idea of what the structure looked like. Debugging the test When we ran the tests, the third test in the block would fail by reporting that the mock of Invoke-RestMethod was called twice. To debug the t ..read more

Azure Pipelines added a caching capability a while back and I thought it was high time I enable it. I was updating a project I maintain and using the example from the docs, I was able to add caching to my build. In the short term, I’ve noticed about 2 minutes per job saved by restoring the cache. (It is Ruby on Windows, so the impact may be a bit outsized to your language of choice.) How does it work? The caching targets a particular file path and uses a key you specify. The key can be a combination of files or strings that identify the current state of dependencies. In my build, I use th ..read more

Last year, Azure Pipelines announced some benefits for open source projects including unlimited build minutes and 10 free parallel jobs. After Microsoft Ignite | The Tour slowed down, I had a bit of time free up. I’ve been involved with the Test-Kitchen project since my time at Chef. I reached out to some of the other maintainers to see if they’d be interested in moving the project over to Azure Pipelines. They were receptive, especially if we could get the build times down. As a cross-platform project, Test-Kitchen used two CI services to run tests on Windows and Linux. The project would be s ..read more

Warning! These keybindings are subject to change and effective as of May 14, 2019. I started playing with the new Windows Terminal. I love hotkeys and live by them. A bit of spelunking in the code brought out: Ctrl+, - Open settings in default editor Ctrl+T - New default profile tab Ctrl+W - Close current tab Ctrl+Tab - Next tab Ctrl+Shift+Tab - Previous tab Ctrl+Shift+1 - New first profile tab Ctrl+Shift+2 - New second profile tab Ctrl+Shift+3 - New third profile tab Ctrl+Shift+4 ..read more