The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center June Update

Intro

With June closing out, we also come to the end of the industry’s spring conference schedule. After multiple developer events around the world we have a vision of the future of mobile and the exciting new things to come. We joined many of you in the developer community at AltConf and, along with it, had a couple of new updates to share. Without further ado, let us dive in to what is new for Visual Studio App Center: auto-provision devices for distribution, automatic publishing of your iOS and Android app builds to the store, and free training resources for iOS developers.

Auto-Provision iOS Devices for Faster Distribution

The week of AltConf, we announced the release of one of our latest features, auto-provisioning for iOS devices. This update makes it faster, and easier, to get your app in the hands of your testers. Once configured, App Center will now automatically collect unregistered device ID’s from your testers, add them to your provisioning profile, then update and resign the binary before distributing it back to your users. Now you, as the developer, can get more time back to developing your app and not having to track the devices your testers are using. Make sure to check it out for yourself and enable automatic signing today.

Automatically Publish iOS & Android Builds Directly to the Store

Ever driven on the quest to automate and integrate App Center more fully, we have added additional functionality to publish your app to the store. Along with your distribution groups, you can now target configured stores in your build settings. On every successful build on the configured branch, the build will automatically be uploaded to the target location. You no longer need to manually download release builds only to reupload them in the distribution tab for publishing. Now, everything is handled behind the scenes to allow you to focus on other tasks. We have a blog post going into more detail on this coming soon, but in the meantime, you can check out our documentation to get started.

Get Free Training on App Center

Along with the feature updates announced at AltConf, we also announced the release of a new end to end training course for native iOS developers wanting to get started with App Center, all done in partnership with Lynda.com and Udemy. Now developers have access to an on-demand, 90-minute dive using App Center with a native iOS/ Swift app to enable them to get up and running quickly. The content is just what you need to get familiar with all the services App Center has to offer. Set up your first mobile CI/CD pipeline connecting your code repo to configured automated builds, write your first functional UI tests, and set up initial distribution pipelines. It also covers continuous monitoring through our crash and analytics services and sending targeted push notifications. Check out the courses today on Lynda.com and Udemy.

Conclusion

June has been a great month for us, and AltConf really served as a capstone to close out conference season and kick off preparations for the next generation of Android and iOS. We hope you take time to check out the newly released updates and are excited for what we have in store. As always, we would love to hear from you.