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Pipeline agent updates and Azure Boards private preview opportunities

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With this update, we highlight the rollout of Pipeline agent v3 and the end of v2 updates. Pipelines running on an operating system not supported by agent v3 will encounter errors.

In addition, we are excited to extend an opportunity to participate in two Azure Boards private previews.

Check out the release notes for details.

General

Azure Boards

Azure Pipelines

Azure General

Service principal and managed identity support in Azure DevOps (public preview)

You can now add Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service principals and managed identities, to your Azure DevOps organizations to grant access to your organization’s resources. For many teams, this feature can be a viable alternative to personal access tokens (PATs) when safely authenticating applications that power automation tooling.

Learn more about this feature on the devblog or by visiting Azure AD service principals & managed identities.

Azure Boards

REST API support for connecting GitHub repositories (private preview)

The Azure Boards-GitHub integration has been available for several years now. It enables the linking between GitHub commits, pull requests, and issues to work items in Boards. However, the current integration is limited to connecting 250 GitHub repositories to a project and there is no API support.

We are happy to announce a limited private preview for those customers who are reaching the limits of the current implementation and would like to add more than 250 GitHub repositories to a project. The preview gets you access to a set of new REST APIs that will allow you to build your own tooling to link up to 2,000 repositories per connection.

These endpoints include:

  • List of current connections
  • List of connected repositories
  • Add and remove repositories

We will provide all the documentation and code samples to help you on-board into the new APIs. If you are interested in participating in the private preview, please email us directly. Be sure to include your organization name (dev.azure.com/{organization}).

Swimlane rules (private preview)

Important

Due to heavy volumne, we have stopped taking new requests into the priviate preview. We expect to release this feature into GA in the next couple of sprints.

Swimlane rules are similar to style rules, but instead, they allow you to setup conditions on your Kanban board to automatically move work items into specific lanes. For example, you might want to setup a lane for each person on your team. When you assign the work item, it will be placed into that lane.

Gif to demo editing of shareable picklist fields.

The feature is one of the top voted items in the work item space and we are excited to finally bring it to customers.

We are taking a limited number of requests to be added to a private preview to help us ensure it is ready for production. If you are interested in getting early access to the feature, send us an email. Please include the name of your organization (dev.azure.com/{organization}).

Community suggestion ticket

Note

This feature will only be available with the New Boards Hubs preview.

Azure Pipelines

Pipeline Agent end of support for Debian 9, Fedora 32, macOS 10.14 and others

With the rollout of agent v3 nearing completion, agent v2 nears the end of its lifecycle.

Starting with version 2.218 of the agent, pipelines running on an operating system that is no longer supported by agent v3 will fail with the following error message:

This operating system will stop receiving updates of the Pipelines Agent in the future. To be able to continue to run pipelines please upgrade the operating system or set an environment variable or agent knob “AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES” to “true”. See https://aka.ms/azdo-pipeline-agent-v2-eos for more information.

You have two options to address the above error in your pipelines:

  1. The recommended option is to move your agents to machines with newer operating systems. This is the preferred option as it will allow you to get future updates to the agent.
  2. Set the AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES variable on the agent.

Setting AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES

To acknowledge Pipeline agent v2 no longer receiving updates, you can configure an environment variable on the agent (e.g. /etc/environment, /etc/profile.d, Windows System Settings):

AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES=true

You can also set a pipeline variable from a YAML pipeline:

jobs:
- job: 'agentWithVariables'
  displayName: 'Agent with variables'

  variables:
    AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES: 'true' # Required to not fail job on operating system that is not supported by .NET 6

And here is an example of how to set a pipeline variable in a classic pipeline:

Update AZ Pipelines

Any of the methods above to set AGENT_ACKNOWLEDGE_NO_UPDATES=true will let the 2.218 or later 2.x agent continue to operate on the operating system that is not supported by agent v3.

Resources

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

Make a suggestion

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.

Thanks,

Dan Hellem