Announcing Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio 2017

Posting on behalf of Ahmed Metwally

Visual Studio Team Services enables developers to create build and release definitions for continuous build integration and deployment of their projects. With a continuous integration and deployment configured, unit tests automatically, assuming the build succeeds and the tests pass, the changes are automatically deployed run on every build after every code push.

To better support this workflow in Visual Studio, we released an experimental DevLabs extension, Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio with the Visual Studio 2017 RC.3 update. The extension makes it simple to automate and stay up to date on your DevOps pipeline for ASP.NET and .NET Core projects targeting Azure App Services and Azure Container Services. You will instantly be notified in Visual Studio if a build fails and will be able to access more information on build quality through the VSTS dashboard.

The Configure Continuous Delivery dialog lets you pick a branch from the repository to deploy to a target App service. When you click OK, the extension creates build and release definitions on Team Services (this can take a couple of minutes), and then kicks off the first build and deployment automatically. From this point onward, Team Services will trigger a new build and deployment whenever you push changes up to the repository.

For more details on how the extension works please check the Visual Studio blog. To download and install the extension, please go to the Visual Studio Gallery.

Microsoft DevLabs Extensions

This extension is a Microsoft DevLabs extension which is an outlet for experiments from Microsoft that represent some of the latest ideas around developer tools. They are designed for broad use, feedback, and quick iteration but it’s important to note DevLabs extensions are not supported and there is no commitment they’ll ever make it big and ship in the product.

It’s all about feedback…

We think there’s a lot we can do in the IDE to help teams collaborate and ship high quality code faster. In the spirit of being agile we want to ship fast, try out new ideas, improve the ones that work and pivot on the ones that don’t. Over the next few days, weeks and months we’ll update the extension with new fixes and features. Your feedback is essential to this process. If you are interested in sharing your feedback join our slack channel or ping us at vsDevOps@microsoft.com.

Ahmed Metwally, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio
@cd4vs
Ahmed is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team focused on improving team collaboration and application lifecycle management integration.