Building Applications

Question 1

What is Azure Pipelines

Answer 1

Microsoft Azure Pipelines is a cloud service that you can use to automatically build, test, and deploy your code project. You can also make it available to other users. And it works with just about any language or project type.

Question 2

What is continuous integration

Answer 2

Continuous integration (CI) is the process of automating the build and testing of code every time a team member commits changes to version control.

Question 3

What are the components of an Azure Pipeline and the function for each one.

Answer 3

1. Tasks: Steps/scripts that defines how the build, test, and deployment steps are run.
2. Code
3. Build agent: a piece of installable software that runs one build or deployment job at a time
4. Artifacts: Think of an artifact as the smallest compiled unit that we need to test or deploy the app

Question 4

What are the differences between implementing hosted and private agents

Answer 4

With Microsoft-hosted agents, maintenance and upgrades are taken care of for you. Each time you run a pipeline, you get a fresh virtual machine. The virtual machine is discarded after one use.

An agent that you set up and manage on your own to run build and deployment jobs is a self-hosted agent. You can use self-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines. Self-hosted agents give you more control and let you install any software you need for your builds and deployments.

Question 5

What are Agent pools

Answer 5

Instead of managing each agent individually, you can organize agents into agent pools. An agent pool defines the sharing boundary for all agents in that pool. In Azure Pipelines, agent pools are scoped to the Azure DevOps organization so you can share an agent pool across projects.

Question 6

What are Service endpoints?

Answer 6

Service endpoints are a way for Azure DevOps to connect to external systems or services

Question 7

What are the two ways to create tasks for a build pipeline

Answer 7

Visual Designer

A YAML file

Question 8

What is the Pipeline as code

Answer 8

It’s basically defining your build and release pipeline as code in a file. It can be version controlled right alongside your source code.

Question 9

What Azure pipeline task can you use if there’s no build-in task type that does something you need, ie node-sass

Answer 9

CmdLine@2

Question 10

What’s the Azure pipeline task for dotnet restore, dotnet build, and dotnet publish?

Answer 10

DotNetCoreCLI@2

Question 11

$(Build.DefinitionName)

Answer 11

A built-in variable that specifies the name of the build pipeline. For example, “SpaceGame-Web-CI.”

Question 12

$(Build.BuildId)

Answer 12

A built-in variable that is a numeric identifier for the completed build, like 115.

Question 13

$(Build.BuildNumber)

Answer 13

A built-in variable is the name of the completed build. You can configure the format, but by default the build number includes the current date followed by the build number for that day. An example build number is “20190329.1.”

Question 14

What are the main parts of a pipeline yaml file?

Answer 14

1. trigger
2. pool
3. variables
4. steps and tasks

Question 15

Create a pipeline called buildConfiguration that has a value of release and refer to it as well

Answer 15

variables:
buildConfiguration: ‘Release’

$(buildConfiguration)

Question 16

Pipeline Templates

Answer 16

A template enables you to define common build tasks one time and reuse those tasks multiple times.

Question 17

Talk through using a template to build a release and debug pipeline

Answer 17

1. Create a template with parameters: buildConfiguration.
2. Add the steps needed to build in the template
3. Call the template (- template: templates/build.yaml) with the right parameters for the buildConfiguration twice.