DevOps

The expectations surrounding app releases have changed greatly in the last several years. From months-long release cycles to release many times in a day. In part, this is made possible by smaller applications powered by micro services and some of the typical technologies employed with these applications. In particular, Containers bring a lot of new capabilities including easier deployments via orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. As a developer and team lead, one of the best added benefits of containers is how easy it is to spin up an environment for each change. What is typically called Environment per PR. Basically, you have a new, short-lived, environment dedicated for your changes. ...

6 months ago I posted about Automatic release notes on Azure DevOps. Since then, I was able to make the process a little more centric to Pull Requests and avoid the occasional incorrect work item showing up in the release notes. The primary difference is that we will use the new Cross Platform Generate Release Notes task instead of the original Powershell based task. This updated version offers a little more control via handlebars extensions that can help us filter out the undesired work items. Here is how the task looks like: ...

In January last year, I wrote about building and deploying Xamarin iOS apps using Azure DevOps. I wanted to write about the Android process but never mustered the energy to do it. Nevertheless, today is the day I will. Not a ton has changed since then. Perhaps, the most relevant change is that last time I showed how to deploy directly to the store and this time I want to show how to deploy as an Enterprise app. Also, the build will use the somewhat new yml build pipeline instead of the visual build. ...

In case you can’t or don’t want to use the Microsoft hosted agents (why?), setting up your own build servers is not too hard. Of course, I hope you don’t have to deal with a proxy server. In the unlikely scenario that you have a proxy server, I honestly hope you don’t have one with a self-signed certificate. Now, if you have to deal with all of this, I feel you. I put some notes together on how to get this setup done and have builds and releases running on your own agents flawlessly. ...

If you are neck-deep into DevOps using Azure DevOps, chances are that you have your code on a git repository, have PBIs or Stories, are using Pull requests, Builds, and releases. If you are doing all of this good stuff, great! Carry on and I will show you how to get that shiny cherry on top of your cake. If you are not, you can probably benefit from this post too, but you will have to figure out how to do the same using the tools you love. ...