Update AppVeyor image

[andreasjordan]

This will probably fail as it's the first try and I can not test this locally.

But let's try to update the AppVeyor image to "Visual Studio 2022" to have SQL Server 2017 and 2019.

[andreasjordan]

Now too many tests are still in the default senario. I can fix this by moving more tests to SINGLE or MULTIPLE, which is the plan anyway.

But before I do this: @potatoqualitee - Do we want to move to the new image and versions 2017 and 2019?

[andreasjordan]

Old output in AppVeyor:

[andreasjordan]

This is the new version:

There is only one yellow line left - I will take care of that later. So this way it is very easy to have a deeper look at the test run.

[niphlod]

not sure LESS lines by default is the correct direction. Nobody looks at the logs, the important bit is the result of the checks.
when things go awry, you need all the log you can get, and easily.

[andreasjordan]

We missed a lot of bugs because tests were green and nobody looked at all the warnings in the AppVeyor output. In my local tests, I capture all the warnings and fail my tests if the output contains warnings. So I would like to have a clean and readable output with green and cyan and only yellow if its important.
I mainly suppressed the info messages from install-dbatools-library.ps1 by adding a silent switch.

But anyway: We sure can discuss if all my changes go to in the right direction. And as always: We can pick only some of the changes.

I can not get this branch to pass all tests, because I would need to change some tests to go into the correct scenario. But if I change tests, only those tests run and you cannot tell if the changes to the infrastructure work.

So I will stop here and we can discuss the changes while I open another branch to move some more tests to the new scenarios.

[niphlod]

we kinda are saying the same things. Log doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is the test results. IMHO a verbose(r) log helps to identify root causes better than a slim(mer) one.
Tests failing and not making the actual "result" of the test fail is a problem of the test itself, not the runner and not the log.... right ?

[potatoqualitee]

gosh i see both sides but believe we can possibly make it verbose only when needed? maybe with an error log that doesnt infinitely export sometimes so it has to be disabled.

i always like older scenarios/versions. are we still covering 2008R2 sometimes?

[andreasjordan]

If you want to see the output of "install-dbatools-library.ps1" I can remove "-Silent" in line 38 of "appveyor.prep.ps1" (currently: & "$PSScriptRoot\..\.github\scripts\install-dbatools-library.ps1" -Silent).

If you want to still use 2008R2, then we can keep using the image "Previous Visual Studio 2015" instead of "Previous Visual Studio 2022". Then we can use 2008R2 for most of the tests. We could also use different images in different scenarios and then test some commands against 2008R2 AND 2019. But this will take longer as we test two times.

I can save my changes locally and revert part of the PR.

[andreasjordan]

But let's wait untill #10090 is merged and development is merged into this branch. Then I can revert some changes.

[andreasjordan]

About Testing against different versions: I thinks it is important to test all commands against different versions (including very old and very new versions) in regular intervals of about once a month. But AppVeyor is not the best place to do that. My idea is to have a lab with a lot of maschines with different SQL Server versions. Then we can run our tests in parallel against those instances. Like running all the test from the SIMPLE scenario in four parallel powershell sessions againt four different SQL Server instances with versions 2008R2 as the oldest supported by dbatools, 2019, 2022 and 2025 as the currtly supported by microsoft. An we can run the COPY scenario against pairs of versions like 2008R2 -> 2019 and 2019 -> 2025. we can then also run real HADR tests with two maschines having the same SQL Server version which is not possible in AppVeyor. And we can have an AD to test things like Kerberos.

So for AppVeyor we have to decide which tests should run on every push and merge against which versions. As we can not get the two most current versions 2022 and 2025, I don't care if we use 2008R2 or 2019. I mainly wanted to try this to see if I have understood how AppVeyor works. I can configure to use the versions you and the other contributors like to test against.

But I am a big fan of "use only code that is needed" and so I removed every line of code that was not relevant. And I'm a fan of "only show information that are usefull" and "don't show warnings that are not warnings" and so I removed some of the output. But I can put all that back in, no problem.