Andrew Wilson's Blog

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How to Set Up Manual Approval for Azure App Service Slot Swaps in Azure DevOps Pipelines

Overview Deploying updates to production environments demands both speed and control. Azure App Service deployment slots, combined with Azure DevOps pipelines, offer a powerful way to manage releases, enabling teams to validate changes in a live-like environment before they go public. However, ensuring that only reviewed and approved changes reach your users is critical for maintaining reliability and compliance. Azure App Service Slots unlock powerful advantages: Site Review. Preview and test your site before it goes live, ensuring everything works as expected.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Friday, June 6, 2025

Automating Semantic Versioning in Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines with GitVersion

Overview Versioning is the unsung hero of software development—often overlooked but absolutely essential. Imagine trying to manage a project without a clear way to track changes, communicate updates, or ensure compatibility. Chaos, right? That’s where versioning steps in, providing structure and clarity. In this post, I’ll share how I streamline versioning in my projects by combining the power of Semantic Versioning (SemVer) with GitVersion, an automation tool that eliminates the manual effort of version management.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, May 7, 2025

webpack | Build Time Environment Variables With Azure DevOps Yaml CI/CD

Problem Space One of my recent projects has involved the use of a static module bundler called webpack to bundle a typescript site so I can serve static content from a Static Web App in Azure. For a while now the site content has not deviated between environments [ dev / test / prod ] and therefore we have simply built and bundled the site for deployment. Recent changes however have required that there be some deviation between environments, at which point the question raised, at what point should this deviation be set or retrieved?

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Thursday, July 25, 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline | Git Shallow Fetch

Problem Space I have been recently working on building a new Yaml pipeline in Azure DevOps and wished to use the GitVersion Task, however, upon running the pipeline the task failed with the following error: ERROR [../../.. ..:..:..:..] An unexpected error occurred: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. After some digging and a conversation with one of my colleagues, it turns out there has been a change on Azure DevOps pipelines.

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Monday, January 9, 2023