Getting Started with Azure DevOps

I have been doing a lot of work lately with our build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps and while it is fresh on my mind I’m going to do a few posts to remind me of some of the things I have leaned and may or may not have gotten to use. This post is going to serve as a jumping-off point for the post that will follow for readers who may not have used Azure DevOps in the past.

Before moving forward make sure and sign up for a free Azure DevOps account.

Create a new Project

When you first log in to Azure DevOps you should end up at something like the following that lists all your organizations on the left, ericlanderson being the sample organization I’m using. In the man section of the page make sure you are on the Projects tab and then click the New project button.

On the next screen, all that is required is a Project name. If you do want to allow public access to the project you will have to tweak an organization policy. Under Advanced you can also tweak how you want to manage work for the project, but that is out the scope of the point of this post. When done click the Create button.

Initialize a Repo

When project creation is complete you will be forwarded to the project landing page as you can see below. Now we want to initialize a new repo for this project. Click Repos button.

Since the sample projects are going to be .NET based I opted to use a .gitignore for Visual Studio. When the options you want are selected click the Initialize button.

When the initialization process is complete you will be taken to a files view of the repo.

Connect to project and clone the repo from Visual Studio

Now that we have the Azure DevOps setup it is time to switch over to Visual Studio and interact with our new project. In Visual Studio all the interactions with Azure DevOps will happen via the Team Explorer window. The first step is to connect to the project. In the Team Explorer window hit the plug icon.

Next, click Manage Connections and then click Connect to a Project.

In the dialog that shows you will need to use the drop-down and select Add an account if you already have an account connected as I do, if not then the process might be slightly different.

After completing the login process with your Azure DevOps credentials you should see your organization listed and under it your project. In this case, the project and repo have the same name. Select the repo and click Clone.

Create Sample Applications

Now that the repo is cloned I’m creating a couple of sample applications using the .NET CLI. Open a command prompt in the root folder of the clone from above and use the following command to create a new Visual Studio solution.

dotnet new sln -n Playground

Next, use the following command to create a new web application.

dotnet new webapp -o src/WebApp1

Then add the new project to the solution file.

dotnet sln add src/WebApp1/WebApp1.csproj

I then repeated the project creation process a second mostly to give us more to work with in future posts. Here are the commands to create the second project and add it to the existing solution.

dotnet new webapp -o src/WebApp2
dotnet sln add src/WebApp2/WebApp2.csproj

Commit Code and Push to Azure DevOps

Back in Visual Studio in the Team Explorer window, we need to switch to the Changes area. There are a couple of ways to get to the changes area. If you are in the home area you can click the changes button.

Another option is to click the current area and select the new area from the drop-down menu. For example, in the following screenshot, I clicked on Branches to show the drop-down and could then click Changes.

Enter a commit message and if you use the dropdown on the Commit All button and select Commit All and Sync it will push all of the changes to the associated Azure DevOps branch.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully if you are new to Azure DevOps this will give you a good jump-off point and will provide a base for some future posts.

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Also published on Medium.