Explore Azure DevOps essentials—boards, repos, pipelines, artifacts, and test plans—and learn the differences between cloud services and on-premises server, including licensing and security.

Create a free Azure DevOps account, set up your organization and project, choose a region (data center), and select private project visibility, then explore the services in upcoming sessions.

Explore Azure DevOps services, focusing on Azure Repos for Git-based source control and Azure Pipelines for build and release, including importing GitHub repos and managing commits.

Azure Boards delivers a suite of agile tools to support planning and tracking work, defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum; track work items, assign tasks, and monitor remaining work.

Discover how Azure artifacts centralizes package management by sharing Maven and NuGet packages from public and private sources, integrated into CI CD pipelines for building and testing software.

Compare Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server, highlighting cloud hosting versus on-premises deployment, data control, and responsibility for upgrades, patches, and security.

Clarify the differences between Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server, including on premises vs cloud deployments. Explain renaming: VSTS to Azure DevOps Services and TFS to Azure DevOps Server.

Explore azure devops access levels, including stakeholders, basic, basic plus test plan, and visual studio subscription, and learn how to add users, assign projects, and invite members.

Discover how a Visual Studio subscription unlocks Azure DevOps as a service with a $150 monthly credit, basic plus test plan, and a 30-day free trial.

Azure DevOps protects data with six redundant copies across regions and a built-in DDoS defense, enabling failover while meeting GDPR, ISO, and HIPPA standards.

Discover Azure boards, its work items, and process templates, then customize templates and manage sprints, backlogs, and queries through hands-on labs that emphasize tracking and collaboration in agile projects.

Explore process templates in Azure DevOps Bootcamp, comparing basic, agile, and scrum by examining work items, their states, and how these building blocks tailor project tracking.

Explore the Azure DevOps process templates: basic, scrum, agile, and CMMI, and learn how to choose and customize them based on your organization and work-item hierarchy.

Learn how to customize Azure DevOps process templates by creating an inherited process, adding new work items, states, fields, and validation rules to fit your project needs.

Explore Kanban boards in Azure DevOps to visualize and move work items (stories, tasks, epics) across in progress to done, and customize with priority fields and color rules.

Customize Azure boards by configuring work item settings, colors, and tags; create columns and swim lanes for high-priority work, manage working days, and align bugs with requirements for burndown charts.

Navigate Azure boards and backlogs to visualize and plan work items. Understand the kanban style board and backlog views, including parent-child relationships and drag-and-drop workflows.

Explore how sprints in azure boards provide a filtered view of work items tied to iterations and timelines. Create sprints, assign items, and move work between sprints to track progress.

Explore how area path and iteration path organize work items by team and timeline, and learn to use queries to filter work items across sprints in Azure DevOps.

Learn how service hooks in Azure DevOps connect events in Azure Boards to third-party tools, sending notifications to teams or Slack when work items or pipelines occur.

Configure Azure DevOps service hooks to integrate with Trello, authenticate with a token, and mirror new work items from Azure DevOps to Trello boards in real time.

Map Jira to boards and Jenkins to build pipelines. Assign Octopus to release pipelines in Azure DevOps and grant developers basic licenses and pilot users free stakeholder licenses for feedback.

Explore Azure Repos basics, including branches, branch policies, and version control with Git and TFVC. Learn about pull requests, merges, forks, and tags using Visual Studio in hands-on labs.

Discover how Azure Repos provides version control to store code and track changes through commits and history. Compare repo version control with Git and learn to import repos from GitHub.

Compare Git and TFVC within Azure Repos, showing distributed Git versus centralized TFVC and how commits, history, branches, and pull requests track code changes.

Import a GitHub repository into Azure Repos via the import option, authenticating private repos, and prepare for deeper dives into commits, pushes, branches, tags, and pull requests.

Create and manage branches in Azure repos to test changes in a test or feature branch, then merge into the master production branch via pull requests.

Explore forks in Azure DevOps repos, contrasting forks with branches as complete repository copies for risky experiments and live deployment flow, including pull requests from fork to main.

Understand branch policies and how they protect the master branch by enforcing rules that safeguard code quality and change management.

Learn how branch policies protect the master branch by enforcing pull requests, required approvers, no direct commits, linked work items, and comment resolution to ensure safe merges.

Explore branch locks and policies in Azure DevOps, showing how code freeze protects master and enforces pull requests for changes.

Explore pull requests in Azure DevOps, learn squash, rebase, and semi-linear merge types, and how these strategies protect branches, review code, and merge feature and fork changes into master.

Discover how to use tags in Azure DevOps to distinguish production and test branches or commits, create lightweight or annotated tags, and apply them to organize your repo history.

Choose the right pull request strategy in Azure DevOps: squash, rebase, or semi-linear; squash yields a clean single-commit history for mature projects.

Learn practical branching strategies in Azure DevOps by creating feature and hotfix branches from the main or production branch, tracking work with topic branches, and merging via pull requests.

Embrace code reviews in Azure Repos via pull requests and branch policies to catch bugs, protect the master branch, and ensure healthy changes before production.

Learn to use rest APIs in Azure DevOps repos to list and manage git repos, retrieve details by id, and delete repos with personal access tokens for automated pipelines.

Revert changes in Azure Repos by creating a revert branch that removes the mistaken commit and merges back into the main branch.

Discover how Azure pipelines automate building and testing code, enabling continuous integration and delivery. Create pipelines with yaml or drag and drop, and deploy to diverse targets.

Enable the classic editor for your pipelines by adjusting organization pipeline settings, then return to your project to create pipelines with the classic editor instead of YAML.

Create your first Azure pipeline by importing a GitHub repo, using the classic editor to build with Maven, and exploring hosted vs self-hosted agents and parallelism.

Publish the Maven build as an artifact in Azure Pipelines using a Microsoft hosted agent, enabling access to the calculator.jar via the Java CI pipeline.

Receive an email when your free parallelism approval for Azure DevOps is granted, after submitting the form, enabling Microsoft hosted agents for Contoso Dev Software.

Enable continuous integration and delivery in Azure Pipelines, automate code builds and tests, publish artifacts, and drive release deployment using classic editor workflows in Azure DevOps.

Master YAML pipelines by defining Azure Pipelines in a YAML file alongside your repo, turning builds into code with versioned pipelines, Maven tasks, and publish artifacts.

Learn to build a dotnet application in Azure Pipelines using MSBuild, publish the dotnet binaries and Dacpac artifacts, and configure continuous integration triggers.

Compare Microsoft hosted agents and self-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines, showing fresh virtual machines for each job and on-premises control for custom software and large builds.

Understand personal access tokens (PAT) and use them as a secure alternative to passwords to authenticate Azure DevOps programmatically by configuring a self-hosted agent on Linux and Windows.

Configure a self-hosted agent in Azure DevOps by creating an agent pool, downloading and configuring the agent, and authenticating with a pat to connect to the server url.

Configure a self-hosted Azure DevOps agent on a Windows machine by downloading, running the config, and connecting with a personal access token, then use the agent pool for pipelines.

Run the config.cmd remove command to delete a configured self-hosted agent, using a PAT token for authentication to complete removal from Azure DevOps.

Configure a Linux self-hosted agent for Azure DevOps by downloading, extracting, and running the agent on a Linux VM, then connect with a PAT and pool.

Explore parallelism in Azure Pipelines by examining how Microsoft hosted agents and free tier limit parallel jobs, organization-level purchases, and the 1800-minute cap for private projects.

Discover parallelism in Azure DevOps by navigating organization settings to manage parallel jobs, comparing one private project pipeline to ten public projects, and understanding 1800 monthly build minutes.

Explore triggers in Azure DevOps build pipelines, including continuous integration, batch changes, branch and path filters, scheduled runs, and build completion dependencies across multi-agent jobs and variables.

Learn how predefined variables in Azure Pipelines provide data paths and diagnostics, including agent.build directory, pipeline workspace, and system.debug; use them to troubleshoot on Microsoft hosted agents and publish artifacts.

Learn to customize Azure pipelines build numbers using predefined variables for formats like year-month-day, and enable automatic work-item creation on failure, including timeout settings for builds.

Explore how service connections link Azure DevOps with third-party tools such as Azure, GitHub, or Docker Hub to deploy code and run tasks in pipelines.

Create a GitHub service connection in Azure DevOps via project settings, pipelines, GitHub, and authorize, then save to link GitHub with Azure pipelines.

Connect your Azure DevOps organization to Azure Active Directory to enable automatic service connections to Azure. This link lets users in Azure Active Directory sign in and access the subscription.

Learn to create a service connection from Azure DevOps to Azure using Azure Resource Manager and automatic service principal, linking a resource group for deployment to the App Service.

Explore how release pipelines deploy built artifacts—binaries, dacpac, and jar files—to dev, testing, and production environments, and connect ci/cd with the build and release process.

Learn to create and deploy a release pipeline in Azure DevOps, using a calculator.jar artifact to deploy to an Azure App Service across development and production stages.

Enable a CI/CD workflow to automatically build and deploy code; commits trigger builds that produce artifacts and deploy to the app service without manual releases.

Link GitHub repositories to Azure pipelines by forking a repository, authenticating with OAuth, and configuring build and release pipelines across GitHub and Azure DevOps.

Configure pre- and post-deployment approvals and gates in release pipelines to control automated deployments across stages, ensuring no active issues and stakeholder validation before production.

Explore pre-deployment and post-deployment gates in Azure DevOps, including after-stage triggers, artifact filters, PR deployment, approvals, and gates like delay, policy checks, and work-item queries.

Learn to configure pre and post deployment approvals, gates (including work item gates), and timeouts, ensuring automatic redeploy to the last successful version when deployments fail.

Explore how Azure DevOps libraries group build and release assets, including variable groups and secure files, for reuse across pipelines via the library tab.

Create and link variable groups in azure devops libraries to reuse username, password, and other secrets across pipelines and releases, avoiding reentry of variables.

Discover how to create task groups in Azure DevOps to encapsulate a sequence of build or release tasks into a single reusable unit. Reuse task groups to reduce overhead.

Learn how ARM templates enable infrastructure as code in Azure DevOps pipelines, using declarative JSON templates with parameters, variables, resources, and outputs to automate repeat deployments.

Learn to deploy Azure resources with an arm template in the portal, including schema, content version, parameters, resources, and deploying a storage account to a resource group.

Delete Azure resources after demos to prevent billing and keep costs optimized, then preview using ARM templates to deploy networks and virtual machines.

Deploys infrastructure with arm templates via azure devops release pipelines, building a virtual network with two subnets for web and data tiers, using azure quickstart templates from GitHub.

Validate the deployed ARM template by inspecting the VNet and subnets in the Azure portal, ensuring IP addresses match the template, and note region alignment issues.

Learn deployment groups as logical sets of machines with agents that deploy code from Azure Pipelines to on premises or virtual targets in dev, test, or production.

Configure deployment group agents to turn machines into servers and deploy code via a release pipeline that uses deployment group jobs and artifacts.

Explore how sonar cloud provides cloud-based code analysis across 26 languages, detecting bugs and code smells. Integrate it with Azure DevOps pipelines to analyze, publish, and improve code quality.

Learn to integrate SonarCloud with Azure DevOps by creating a SonarCloud organization, authenticating with a personal access token, and configuring a pipeline to analyze a .NET project and publish results.

Use SonarCloud with Azure Pipelines to publish code analysis results, revealing bugs, code smells, duplications, and coverage metrics, guiding developers to fix issues and optimize code.

learn what technical debt is in software development and how to manage it in azure devops using sonar cloud to identify vulnerabilities, improve code coverage, and reduce future rework.

Explore Whitesource Bolt, an open source vulnerability scanner available as a GitHub app and an Azure DevOps extension that scans code to detect and fix open source vulnerabilities.

Learn how Whitesource Bolt works by configuring an Azure Pipelines workflow that restores, scans, and builds a GitHub-hosted project using marketplace integration.

White Source Bolt integrates with Azure Pipeline to scan code, publish vulnerability and licensing risk reports, and guide upgrades—reducing technical debt by fixing high-risk issues.

Learn how Azure Key Vault securely stores secrets and keys, and how to fetch them in Azure Pipelines using ARM templates, preventing exposed usernames and passwords.

Create an Azure key vault by selecting a resource group, naming it, choosing East US region and standard pricing, then deploy and validate; next, learn adding and using secrets.

Learn to store and fetch secrets in Azure Pipelines using keywords and key vaults, create and manage password secrets, and securely link them to a service connection for automated deployments.

Learn to deploy Azure SQL via ARM templates in pipelines, using parameter.json and Azure Key Vault to fetch secrets securely, while forking repos and using feature branches.

Learn how to protect passwords by referencing Azure key vault secrets in Azure pipelines using an ARM template, then deploy an Azure SQL database via a release pipeline.

Explore secure deployment of Azure resources with ARM templates and Key Vault secrets in release pipelines. Diagnose deployment issues and use Key Vault secrets to log in to Azure SQL.

Explore deployment strategies for Azure DevOps, weigh the change impact, and learn to roll out releases in chunks across environments and regions using various deployment types and methodologies.

Explore deployment strategies like recreate, remapped, blue-green, and canary, comparing downtime and traffic shifting. See how version A to B transitions occur across servers and regions.

Demonstrate how to create and configure a release pipeline, apply deployment strategies such as canary or blue-green, and architect staged traffic from dev to prod with post-deployment approvals.

Learn how Docker creates lightweight containers from Docker files into images, enabling a consistent, portable runtime across environments and future Kubernetes integration.

Discover how a Dockerfile defines the base image from Docker Hub, sets a working directory, copies files, installs Python packages with pip, and runs the app when the container starts.

Build and publish a docker image from a node app to an azure container registry using a two-stage dockerfile with node and nginx via azure devops pipelines.

Learn to build a Docker image with a Dockerfile, push via the build pipeline to Azure Container Registry, then pull and run the container and deploy to Kubernetes pods.

Explore how to reference secrets stored in a key vault from Azure DevOps pipelines using variable groups, ensuring credentials are not embedded, and SonarCloud for code quality.

Document and publish the Azure DevOps wiki to centralize project documentation, onboarding articles, and blueprints, while tracking history in the associated Git repository.

Explore Azure Boards dashboards to visualize your team's progress with widgets and charts. Track burn down, burn up, velocity, lead time, cycle time, and cumulative flow diagrams to improve productivity.

Create and customize Azure DevOps dashboards with widgets, configure team or project dashboards, track builds, burndown and burn up charts, and display cycle time and lead time.

Explore configuring Azure DevOps dashboards with widgets for work item tracking, pull requests, release pipelines, sprint burndown, velocity chart widgets, and a welcome page to boost team productivity.

Demonstrates creating and saving multiple work item queries in Azure DevOps to customize dashboards, including active bugs, sprint-based iterations, and assigned-to charts.

Create and customize Azure DevOps dashboards by building and saving queries, adding work item charts and widgets, and tracking remaining work and team progress for product managers and scrum masters.

Explore Azure Artifacts, distinguish build artifacts from Azure Artifacts, and learn about feeds, feed views, upstreams, artifact security, and how to push packages from on-premises to Azure Artifacts.

Explore how Azure Artifacts centralizes package management for NuGet, npm, Python, Maven, and universal packages, enabling secure sharing across feeds, teams, and pipelines.

Explore feeds in Azure Artifacts, organizational spaces that store nugget, npm, maven, python, and universal packages in one place, with public feeds for internet sharing and use in pipelines.

Compare build artifacts with Azure Artifacts, then see how compiled code becomes build outputs while Azure Artifacts stores packages like Nugget, NPM, Maven, and Python to manage dependencies.

Explore how feed views let you share a subset of package versions with consumers, using local, pre-release, and release views and promoting artifacts from testing to production.

Learn how upstream sources in Azure Artifacts let you store packages from public registries like nuget.org, npm, maven, and pip in a single feed and use them in pipelines.

Learn to publish a package to Azure Artifacts by downloading the package, setting up nuget.exe and nuget.config, connecting to a feed, and pushing with a personal access token.

Push a nugget package to Azure artifacts from on-premises by editing nugget.config, connecting to the feed, and using nugget push with a personal access token for authentication.

Explore Azure artifacts: manage packages with local, pre-release, and release views, promote and enlist packages, set retention and permissions, and connect upstream public sources for pipelines.

Explore Azure test plans to manage test cases, test suites, and test points, enabling manual, exploratory, and automation testing while capturing feedback via extensions.

Discover Azure test plans as a browser-based testing management tool that drives quality and collaboration, enabling manual or exploratory testing and stakeholder feedback for faster development.

Explore manual, exploratory, and automated testing types, including user acceptance testing with beta customers, and learn to set up Azure Test Plans and test cases with Azure Pipelines for CI/CD.

Start a 30-day free trial of Azure test plans from organization settings, then create a test plan with test suites and test cases, assigning area and iteration paths.

Understand test plans, test suites, and access levels in Azure DevOps, including basic, basic plus, and stakeholder roles. Execute tests, view charts, and collect feedback to monitor progress.

Explore Azure DevOps test plans and test suites, review created test cases, and learn how to execute tests efficiently within the Azure DevOps test execution workflow.

Execute and mark test outcomes as pass or fail, reset and re-run web app steps like cart and payment, and visualize progress with execution history, charts, and test plans.

Explore Azure test plans parameters to run manual tests with different data sets, using shared parameters for reusable test data across plans.

Learn how to create and use shared test parameters in Azure Test Plans, such as quantity and size, to run test cases with multiple values and view automatic progress reports.

Explore how to create and manage test configurations and configuration variables, assign them to test plans, and run test cases across multiple operating system environments using pipelines.

Build a Java pipeline in the classic editor, run Maven tests, and publish JUnit results to Azure Pipelines, then link test results to Azure Test Plans.

Learn to use the test and feedback extension in Azure DevOps test plans to capture screenshots, record tests, and create bugs from the browser or Chrome extension, boosting QA productivity.

Open the status.dev dot azure.com page to verify outages and validate performance issues. Note service disruption and region-specific impacts on pipelines, and review Azure Artifacts feeds for issues detected.

Analyze Azure DevOps organization usage by monitoring throughput limits, rate limits, and five minute window, then educate users to prevent bottlenecks and ensure smooth collaboration.

Learn how to enable and use Azure DevOps notifications to alert your team about project activity, including work item changes, code reviews, pull requests, and failed builds.

Explore configuring Azure DevOps notifications at the project level to receive email alerts for build failures and work item deletions, with filters by project, priority, and initiator.

Master Azure DevOps policies to safeguard your organization by configuring security settings, access controls, and restrictions on public projects, third-party connections, OAuth, SSH, and GitHub invites.

Explore how security groups define permissions in Azure DevOps at organization, collection, and project levels. Configure retention policies to keep 30 days and the last three builds or releases.

Configure Azure DevOps retention policies to keep artifacts 30 days, retain 3 pipeline runs, and hold pull requests 10 days, while setting group permissions to prevent deletions.