How can you use Azure DevOps for continuous integration?

2 How to set up Azure DevOps for CI?

To use Azure DevOps for CI, you need to have an Azure DevOps account and a project, which you can create a free account and a project from the Azure DevOps website. Then, you can create or import a repository in Azure Repos using Git or TFVC, or import your existing code from GitHub or other sources. Additionally, you will need to create a pipeline in Azure Pipelines; this is a sequence of steps that defines how to build and test your code. You can use YAML or a graphical editor to create your pipeline, as well as predefined templates or customize your own. Furthermore, you should configure your pipeline triggers, which are events that initiate your pipeline runs. For CI, the trigger is typically when you push a code change to your repository. Finally, add tasks to your pipeline; these are actions that perform specific operations on your code. You can use built-in tasks or install custom tasks from the marketplace, and control the task behavior with variables, parameters, conditions, and expressions. Once you have completed these steps, you can run your pipeline and monitor the results in the Azure Pipelines dashboard. Notifications, badges, and reports will also help you keep track of your pipeline performance.

3 How to improve your CI with Azure DevOps?

Using Azure DevOps for CI can help you achieve faster and more reliable software delivery. However, to further improve your CI, you should use branches and pull requests to manage your code changes, parallel jobs and agents to speed up your pipeline runs, caching and artifacts to optimize your pipeline resources, code analysis and testing tools to improve your code quality and coverage, and feedback and monitoring tools to measure and improve customer satisfaction and application performance. Branches let you isolate and test your code changes without affecting the main codebase, while pull requests let you review and merge your code changes with quality checks and approvals. Parallel jobs let you run multiple pipeline steps or stages at the same time, while agents are machines that run your pipeline tasks. You can use hosted agents provided by Azure DevOps or self-hosted agents that you manage yourself. Caching lets you store and reuse intermediate files or dependencies that are used frequently in your pipeline, while artifacts let you store and share the output of your pipeline. Code analysis tools let you check your code for errors, vulnerabilities, style, and complexity, while testing tools let you create, run, and analyze various types of tests. Finally, feedback tools let you collect and respond to user feedback while monitoring tools let you track and troubleshoot your application metrics.