Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.08.09

Sasha Rosenbaum

August 9th, 20190 0

This week I had the privilege of participating in Microsoft training on “customer-driven engineering”. The training focused on the process of formulating and iterating over hypotheses of what features are the most useful for our customers based on their feedback. It was amazing to discover that all of our assumptions regarding requirements for a particular feature were incorrect by having just a few conversations with developers outside the company!

Even after we choose which features to invest in, the Azure DevOps team continues to iterate over the implementation based on customer feedback. It is the quick deployment cycle, and the short feedback loops enable us to do this effectively. As the 10th anniversary of the Continuous Delivery book is approaching, I reflect on how many professionals back then considered daily deployments unattainable. It is immensely rewarding to work on a tool that enables more organizations around the world to approach this ideal!

The blogs from this week cover CI/CD workflow improvements for engineers from different walks of life.

Get started integrating Dynatrace into your Azure DevOps release pipelines
This article by Rob Jahn demonstrates the integration between Azure Pipelines and Dynatrace. Rob shows an example of calling the Dynatrace API via a PowerShell script task in a Release Pipeline to create Information events for your CI/CD process, providing more context around your application lifecycle to your monitoring team! You can also find the script examples in Rob’s GitHub repo.

Showing VS Code Extension Test Outputs in Azure Pipelines
This short post from Aaron Powell covers generating test outputs for Azure Pipelines using Mocha and xUnit. With just a few lines of code, Mocha is set up to create a test report visually displayed by the build pipeline. Nice work, Aaron!

Getting Started with Azure Pipelines for Xamarin Developers
This post from Dan Siegel looks at using Azure Pipelines to deploy Xamarin applications. The post covers getting started with Azure DevOps and installing the marketplace extensions made for publishing mobile apps into Apple App Store and Google Play. The post then covers additional useful extensions, and configuring secrets for mobile application signing. Stay tuned for the future post from Dan on configuring the mobile app builds using YAML!

Understand Azure DevOps CLI
This post by Jaish Mathews explores the use of the relatively new Azure DevOps CLI extension which allows you to interact with Azure DevOps services using the command-line. The post covers what you need to install the extension and start exploring the available commands in az pipelines. After the installation, you can also explore the documentation for the CLI commands for repos, boards, and artifacts.

AzureDevOps: CICD for Azure Data Factory
This post by Jayendran Arumugam explores configuring CI/CD for Azure Data Factory using Azure DevOps. Although the experience is still a little rough around the edges, it allows you to automate the ADF deployments, bringing the DevOps mindset into the ETL realm. Thank you Jayendran for creating the walkthrough!

If you’ve written an article about Azure DevOps or find some great content about DevOps on Azure, please share it with the #AzureDevOps hashtag on Twitter!