Create a CI/CD pipeline instantly with Visual Studio 2019

I have set up Azure build and deployment pipelines a number of times from scratch before, so this time I’m going to trigger it from Visual Studio which should be more straightforward.

The first step of the process is to right-click on the solution name and chose the ‘Configure Continuous Delivery to Azure…’ option.

This will open a window from where you need to pick up the location of the source code, the subscription and the app service. For the app service, you can either create a new plan or like in my case, just choose an existing one which is already running.

The output window informs you of the current status of the pipeline creation. It actually took less than a minute for me to have everything up and running.

Let’s head over to Azure DevOps and see the results. Clicking on the blue rocket icon reveals that there is both a pipeline (previously named build in previous versions of Azure DevOps) and a release. Both have been triggered automatically, and we can see that the outcome was successful.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper, by clicking the edit button on the pipeline first.

Here we can see that everything has been set up as expected, and the process is intelligent enough to create the right tasks depending on the project type. In this case here, we have a process made up of a number of steps that restore the required nuget packages, build and test the solution, and then package the build output as an artifact. This artifact is then picked up by the release pipeline and deployed to the required environment.

Moving to the release pipeline we can observe two things. First, the little lighting icon on the Artifacts step brings us to the trigger configuration. Here it is already set up to trigger a release whenever a new build from the master branch is available.

The second thing is the warning icon in the dev deployment stage. Clicking it also reveals the details, this time of the issue. It's telling us that we need to choose a deployment agent. Microsoft supplies various agents hosted on Azure, and we have to choose one depending on our solution type.

One thing to remember is that these pipelines are free to use for up to 30 hours each month. If you need more than that, you have to take out your credit card and pay for the extra consumption.

Well, that was easy, wasn’t it? I usually choose different names for the various steps, so I will go around and change them, but here we can see how powerful the template is. Next time I will also show you how to add additional stages.