Microsoft Automation

[captn3m0]

While the pages for various MS pages are easy enough to parse, (See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/sharepoint-updates for eg) - a common problem was with the dates not being accurate enough.

I'd raised this https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-OfficeUpdates/issues/363, but dates are KB specific, and not mentioned on the main page. It's unlikely this will change.

As a workaround, I've created a KB-date mapping here: https://github.com/captn3m0/microsoft-kb-metadata, so we can use that instead.

[BiNZGi]

Microsoft started to build documentation about the latest releases. I have found the markdown file for mssqlserver on github here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/SupportArticles-docs/blob/main/support/sql/releases/download-and-install-latest-updates.md

Perhaps we can use this to better parse things for us. What do you think?

[captn3m0]

The Excel sheet at https://aka.ms/sqlserverbuilds (linked in the markdown file) is probably easier to use for our usecase.

[marcwrobel]

For SQL server we would have to switch to the Build number or version for releaseCycle (e.g. 16.0 instead of 2002).

The presence of CUX in the releaseLabel is also an issue as it will not be updated automatically. I don't know how to keep this information while having a fully automated update process though.

[stbuehler]

I'd recommend against parsing markdown files in MS github doc repos; MS removed the https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-OfficeUpdates repo mentioned above and https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-Exchange too, and I'd suspect none of the other repos are safe either.