Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) – formerly known as Visual Studio Online – is a SaaS offering of Visual Studio on Microsoft’s Azure platform. At its heart, the service is the cloud implementation of
Team Foundation Services. Two of the service’s features, Continuous Integration and Release Management, were leveraged by AIS for a large federal client as part of a broader push for more streamlined DevOps practices.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice where developers can integrate their changes into a shared code repository, which in turn triggers an automated build. This allows the development team to be quickly notified of any problems or errors caused by the checked-in change. VSTS’s Release Management Service allows developers to automate their deployment pipelines across any environment and platform – more than just .NET applications. For our federal client, the goal was to automate the entire continuous integration and release process for an ASP.NET Web API hosted in an Azure Web App. Since the client already had a subscription to VSTS, it was very straightforward for us to implement the entire solution within that one service. Read More…