We all know that Azure DevOps lets you create build and deployment pipelines – aka. Continuous Build & Deploy. The latest version of these Azure DevOps pipelines uses YAML and – well, if you’re like me, YAML looks scary. Once you get going with it, it’s not so bad.

In this session, Ben will show you how to use YAML-based pipelines to build, deploy and configure an ASP.NET Core / EF Core application into Azure. We’ll start with the basics of YAML pipelines, the basics of building your code and then gradually move into more complex scenarios such as using SQL Server to test our code, use EF Core migrations to deploy database changes, populate “lookup” data in SQL Server, and edit settings in appsettings.json. We’ll also talk about how to handle multiple environments (dev, test, stage, prod, etc) and deployment approvals. Along the way, Ben will cover how to write and use custom extensions from the Visual Studio Marketplace to streamline your pipelines.

You will learn:

• What is YAML and YAML-based pipelines? How is it the same/different from JSON-based pipelines?
• How do you handle multiple environments?
• How do you use approvals to control deployments to environments?