From Soup to Nuts: Azure DevOps with Visual Studio 2017

This is the introductory post in a four part series walking through the process of creating a project in Visual Studio and building out a complete CI/CD pipeline to get that code into production on Azure using Azure DevOps.

Here’s a rough outline of where I think this series will go. As soon as I have the content ready I’ll link to them from here:

Part 1: Publish to an Azure DevOps Repository

Part 2: Setting up a Build Pipeline in Azure DevOps

Part 3: Setting up a Release Pipeline in Azure DevOps

Part 4: Adding a Database to the Project

A little context… Lately I’ve been using the Eclipse plugin Subversive for source control on my java-based projects, which uses an on-prem SVN server. For C# projects I use the Visual Studio plugin VisualSVN. Back in the old days I used an on-prem TFS server. Before that VSS which I’ll just leave that right there. So I’ve used SVN for many years and I have no complaints about it in particular or concurrent version control systems in general. But this series isn’t about those tools or centralized version control. And it’s not about Git Bash or shelling out to the command line from GitHub Desktop or anything like that.  Download the Pro Git book if you want to dive deep into that area. 

I’ve also used TFS v1.0 and before that NAnt and then CruiseControl somewhere along the line. Currently my place of work uses TeamCity for builds, NUnit for tests, Octopus for deployments and probably other things like DbUp for database scripting. And I’ve deployed straight to Azure from Visual Studio more times than I can count. But guess what? This series isn’t about any of those things either. In this series I want to help you to take your game up to the next level so that your pipeline to production is fully automated. And I want to keep it as simple as possible. So let’s get started at Part 1.