When I switched to Hugo, I knew my new blog would not have the comments enabled. I planned it “for later”, as I didn’t want to use Disqus (available by default in Hugo).

This year I took part in “Advent of Code” - a challenge with the series of puzzles to solve using any programming language. I tried two years ago but resigned after the first day. This year was different, as we set the internal leaderboards, and I had a motivation to test my skills. My initial idea was to use only the PowerShell, but after some talks, I thought “maybe it’s a good moment to start learning go lang”?

Decision was made. And announced. And deadline set - so I will look stupid if I don’t do it. Something that was a strong decision started weakening. But setting a goal, and telling your friends about it is a strong motivator. Not to mention the WordPress annoyances during the transition period.

I blog with WordPress since the 17th of February 2009. At first, I used a blog-as-a-service approach, as I wanted just to start writing and see how it goes, not building all the infrastructure. I was writing for myself, to document interesting things I found during my adventures with SQL Server.

One of the new YAML pipeline steps I prepared recently involved interaction with work items. I wanted to add the comments to the task (with the task ID extracted from some file). So, I created a PowerShell step that was executing Invoke-WebRequest (with try/catch logic, obviously), the process finished successfully, but nothing happened. I mean - the comments were not there. Uhmmmm, why?! The log analysis gave me a slight hint about what was wrong (as seen in the post header picture):

Last week finally came that day: “I will give a shot to a Docker Desktop for Windows 10 Home”. To make it possible I run a long-postponed Windows Update to version 2004 (it allows to use WSL2). The upgrade and installation went smoothly, but the docker refused to cooperate.

In the previous post, I added the tasks to on-premises TFS using C#. This time I will add similar data using an Excel add-in. I will also learn how to accidentally remove the link from the task to the parent element.

An assignment: using data from the Excel file (sample data below) insert them into TFS (on-premises). Automatically. Start. You have three months from now. Or a few hours.

In the third part of a series, I focus on drawing the constraints' descriptions and the colours. And also a bit of PowerShell for automation.

The post is a second part of the series. In the previous one, I created an SVG image of the simple SSIS package, but when I tried to draw something advanced (upper image below) I got something far from expected (lower image below). This time I’ll fix it.