Build .NET Projects using Visual Studio vs Azure Pipelines

Question

We have many developments going on in.NET and developers use Visual Studio 2019 to Develop / Build / Test applications on their local machine first and then they publish it to Azure App Service Service (i.e Production). We are planning to construct Azure Pipeline for automated build and deployment. Would like to know, whether we should create a couple more App Service and call it as Dev and Staging? And ask the developers to directly commit all the changes to the remote repository (Azure Repo)?

If we do that, then the inbuilt option that is provided in Visual Studio will not be used by Developers. Should we ask the developers to first test it on their machine and then commit it to the remote repository? What would be the right approach?

Answer 1

Ideally yes, you'd want your developers to be able to run the code locally for the sake of unit tests (as one example) and then - when ready - commit to a remote repository on Azure DevOps.

You could then issue a PR, merge into (for example) the 'develop' branch, and have this branch kick off your CICD pipeline in Azure DevOps to deploy to your development environment (or App Service). You could also split your CICD into one build pipeline, which at the end stage hands off to one of three release pipelines (Dev, Test, Production). The flexibility is there.

Our developers used to use Visual Studio to deploy to AWS via the AWS Toolkit before we 'matured' into committing code to Azure DevOps and then letting the CICD pipeline take care of that step for us. Much better audit capability, processes (PR, Approvers etc) and automation.