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”?

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):

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.

In the series of learning something new, I started with analysing of the SSIS package XML. I know what I want to extract, so let the fun begin. I will use Powershell to get the data from the .dtsx files and save it to the database. The whole script is presented below with comments. For more information scroll down.