Beginner’s Guide to Azure DevOps: CI/CD, Repos & Boards

Configure Azure boards, select a work item process (basic, scrum, agile, or CMMi), and use boards to plan and track epics, stories, and tasks, with Jira integration options.

Learn the basics of Azure Boards basic process, compare it with agile, and see how epics, issues, and tasks organize and track work across the workflow states do and active.

Explore how agile replaces waterfall with parallel execution and daily releases. See how epics, features, user stories, and tasks organize work in Azure DevOps.

Explore how scrum aligns with agile, detailing product backlog items, epics, features, impediments, and bugs. Learn how CMMI level five companies approach process standards and agile adoption.

Master Kanban boards in Azure Boards to visualize and manage work items from epics to tasks. Track progress with work in progress limits and status updates from todo to completed.

Learn how to plan and run sprints in Azure DevOps, including pulling work items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog, running daily standups, and conducting sprint retrospectives.

Azure DevOps Demo Generator creates pre-populated sample projects in your Azure DevOps organization, including code repositories, work items, iterations, service endpoints, and build‑release definitions from templates.

Discover how to use queries in Azure DevOps to filter work items by criteria with the query editor, then run, refine, and export results.

Azure Repos provides version control tools to manage code. Developers clone the base code and push changes to the repository, with base code in Java, Node.js, React.js, or dotnet.

Explore how version control and source code management preserve history, enable collaboration, enable undo and rollback, and provide traceability and backups across local, centralized, and distributed models.

Learn how source code management and version control work across local, centralized, and distributed systems, and compare tools like GitLab, Bitbucket, Mercurial, Subversion, and GitHub for public and private repositories.

Explore multiple ways to initialize an Azure repo, including initializing the main branch with a readme or gitignore, and importing repositories from GitHub with public or private access.

Create an Azure repo in the Azure DevOps portal; the project name becomes the default, empty repo, with optional private or public access, using git for distributed version control.

Learn to clone an Azure repository into your local machine using git, generate and use credentials, install git, and inspect the dot git directory.

Clone an empty Azure repo to your local machine, create a file, stage with git add, commit, and push to the main repository to initialize the project.

Learn how to clone a repository in Azure DevOps, track changes with git add and commit, push updates, and use git pull to fetch changes into your local workspace.

Explore the difference between git fetch and git pull. Fetch shows metadata about updates in the main repository without altering your local files, while pull updates your local copy.

Learn how branches organize parallel work and keep the master branch stable. See how feature, bug-fix, and release branches merge back to master to support build, test, and production deployment.

Create and manage feature branches from master in Azure DevOps; commit and sync history, push to the main repo, and test across test and acceptance environments.

Learn how to create a pull request from a feature or bug fix branch, review changes, and merge into master (or release) for production deployment.

Automate building, testing, and deploying code with Azure Pipelines, a cloud service that supports any language and deploys to any platform or cloud, including on premises.

Describe how a build compiles source code into binary, links libraries and dependencies from repositories, creates a deployable package, and how pipelines automate this with language-specific build tools.

Explore continuous integration and deployment with automated builds, tests, scans, artifact creation, and multi-environment deployment across dev, uat, staging, and production.

Explore the two Azure pipelines types—classic editor and YAML—and learn to create build and release pipelines in the Azure DevOps portal.

Enable parallel jobs in Azure DevOps by submitting the access form, then wait 24–48 hours for approval and enable Microsoft hosted parallelism in organization settings.

Create a build pipeline in Azure DevOps using the classic editor, selecting Azure Repos, choosing ASP dotnet core, configuring NuGet and Msbuild tasks, and publishing the artifact.

Compare Microsoft hosted and self-hosted Azure Pipelines agents, detailing how Microsoft provides and deletes the VM, while you manage self-hosted VMs with Windows, Ubuntu, or Mac.

Discover how Azure App Service, a platform as a service, hosts web apps, rest APIs, and mobile backends with auto scaling and high availability managed by Microsoft.

Learn to create an Azure App Service to deploy ASP.NET applications by logging into portal.azure.com, selecting subscription, resource group, web app name, runtime stack, and hosting plan.

Learn how to create a service connection in Azure DevOps using a service principal to securely access Azure App Service through pipelines, with RBAC-based authentication and certificate or key credentials.

Create a service principal in Azure Active Directory by registering an app, creating a certificate or secret, and granting contributor access to a subscription for Azure DevOps service connections.

Create a service connection in Azure DevOps using a manually configured service principal for a subscription; verify credentials, grant access to all pipelines, then deploy to Azure App Services.

Deploy an asp.net core app to azure app service via a release pipeline in azure devops. Use the build artifact and an app service deploy task with a service connection.

Enable continuous integration and continuous deployment in Azure DevOps to automatically build on code changes, create artifacts, and deploy releases to dev, acceptance, qa, and production stages.