Course:

Course Description

This 2-day course focuses on building and releasing .NET applications using the capabilities of Team Foundation Server 2018.

This course has been designed for organizations who build and release applications within their organization rather than in the cloud. That said, a large part of the course is equally useful for cloud scenarios.

We’ll start with an overview of the Visual Studio product family and then work through configuring the team project we’ll be using. We’ll configure teams to better manage work, and then clone a Git repository containing the primary application we’ll be building and releasing.

The course covers planning, installing, and maintaining build environments and how to author build definitions for your applications. We’ll examine many of the configuration options to understand how to best configure the pipeline for your applications.

We then deep dive into Release Management and how you can release your applications to your on-premises infrastructure. The final two modules of the course examine how to run automated functional tests as part of your pipeline and how you can visualize the build and release status using dashboards.

If you are eager to learn how to implement DevOps practices designed to streamline your build and release processes using TFS, this is the course for you.

This course includes hands-on labs to reinforce practical skills and ensure you’re ready to use the tools upon your return to the workplace.

Outline

Module 1: A Lap Around the Microsoft Visual Studio Family

What’s new in TFS?
Overview of the Visual Studio family
Overview of product features
The need for centralized builds
The importance of release management

Module 2: Configuring Your Project in TFS

Creating and configuring a new team project
Configuring teams in TFS
Cloning a Git repository into your team project

Module 3: Configuring Your Build Environment

Understanding build infrastructure
Creating agent pools and queues
Installing and upgrading build agents
Specifying capabilities on your agents
Configuring security
Overview of non-Windows agents
Overview of hosted build infrastructure

Module 4: Automating Builds

Creating a new build definition
Understanding build templates
Common build tasks
Queuing a build

Module 5: A Closer Look at Build Attributes

Source repository options
Defining and using build variables
Running multiple concurrent builds
Configuring Continuous Integration (CI) and scheduled builds
Configuring build options
Build retention policies

Module 6: Customizing Your Build Process

Task versioning
Executing unit tests during our build
Examining test results from a build
Using tasks groups
Extending builds using scripts
Other helpful build tasks

Module 7: Other Build Features

Viewing build status
Using process parameters
Managing build definitions and using build folders
Task control options and conditional build tasks
Controlling build outputs and understanding artifacts
Packaging your .NET application

Module 8: Overview of Release Management

What is Release Management
Key concepts in Release Management
The current state of Release Management in TFS/VSTS
A quick look at licensing for Release Management

Module 9: Creating Automated Release Pipelines

Recap of Release Management
Understanding artifacts
Creating a release definition
Understanding environments
Common tasks in your release
Cloning environments.

Module 10: A Closer Look at Configuring Environments

Configuring your approval workflow
Defining custom variables for your environments
Using variable groups
Understanding pre-deployment conditions
Configuring the environment owner

Module 11: Defining a Release Workflow for On-Premises Servers

Overview of release tasks
Using the manual intervention task
Copying files and running scripts
Releasing a web application to an IIS server
Tracking our release

Module 12: Automating Functional and Performance Tests

Configuring infrastructure for test execution
Executing UI tests (Coded UI and Selenium tests)
Executing load and performance tests

Module 13: Creating Dashboards to Show Build and Release Status

Creating a Build and Release dashboard
Displaying build information on the dashboard
Displaying release information on the dashboard

Audience

This course is designed for DevOps engineers, .NET developers, TFS administrators, and build masters. It is a hands-on look at various technologies rather than a high-level management overview.

Prerequisites

Attendees should be familiar with Visual Studio and the use of Team Foundation Server.

What You Will Learn

At the completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

Describe the current features in TFS focused on build and release management
Plan and configure a scalable build environment including pools and queues
Configure appropriate security on pools and queues
Author build definitions to suit most scenarios
Configure Continuous Integration (CI) builds as well as scheduled builds
Use existing build templates as well as create new build templates
Create customized build workflow using OOTB and third-party build steps
Automate the execution of tests as part of our build
Understand the features and capabilities of Release Management
Use Release Management to create and manage releases
Use Release Management to create environments
Manage configuration information in each environment
Deploy software to on-premises servers
Configure continuous release by triggering releases from builds
Create approval workflows and track releases across environments
Create an environment for the execution of functional tests including Coded UI and Selenium tests
Create dashboards to show current build and release status

ALMBR18 – Build and Release Management Using TFS 2018