My project has two web apps (.NET) and 2 mobile apps (mobile apps built in Xamarin and deployed in iOS and Android).
Team is unclear on trade-offs between using Azure DevOps and MS AppCenter.
From this SO item
What's the principal difference between MS AppCenter and Azure DevOps (former VSTS)?
it seems that "...App Center is for mobile app deployment & monitoring whereas DevOps is for any-platform development & deployment."
But what are the trade offs between the two? I think we would like to do all builds in Azure DevOps and then feed these builds into App Center for deployment and monitoring, but is it possible to do this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
App center is great if you want to quickly build and distribute mobile apps, it have build in tempate to deploy app to App Store , Google Play Store, Intune as well as analytics. However, the CI/CD is not very customisable.
Azure Devops is great for CI/CD customisable, you can configure the build, trigger build on pull request and etc... Also you can configure stages in CD. Also good for keeping your project, code and ci/cd in one place. However the deployment for mobile apps is not great, as there are no built in template at the moment, you can write your own yaml or get template from the market though.
Integration from Azure Devops and VS App Center give the best experience in my opinion.
Related
I need to deploy an azure function app via Azure DevOps.
If I deploy via visual studio, it asks me to create a publish profile, where storage is specified.
I'm unsure how this works however with DevOps.
I have a build pipeline that builds the (.net core) function app, but on the release, I'm unsure how to proceed.
The Microsoft documentation is quite poor in my opinion, so would appreciate any expertise.
Thanks!
You have to create the underlying infrastructure prior to deploying the Azure Function to it.
There are steps you could user here and have an inline script job/stage within your pipeline:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/create-first-function-cli-csharp?tabs=azure-cli%2Cin-process#create-supporting-azure-resources-for-your-function
Alternatively you could use an ARM template or terraform to provision the app service and storage account as required.
I've got a sample github actions deployment of a function which uses the inline script method here:
https://github.com/brettmillerb/testfunctionapp/blob/master/.github/workflows/main.yml
I have uploaded my flutter mobile application to Azure DevOps. Now I want to directly publish my application on google play console. Is there any way to do that kind of things using azure?
can I use pipeline?
For this issue , I think azure devops does not support publishing the project directly to the google play console.
Azure devops support Google Play extension.This extension contains a set of deployment tasks which allow you to automate the release, promotion and rollout of app updates to the Google Play store from your CI environment. In order to automate the release of app updates to the Google Play store, you need to have manually released at least one version through the Google Play Developer Console.
If you want to publish to google play console , you can refer to this document.
Azure devops provide way to publish directly to playstore. Need to create piline ,build and deploy to playstore.
Need playstore private key to deploy on playstore.
I am having multiple logic apps in resorce group.How can i copy all and deploye to different RG.
what is best way to do so?
I am not prefering Moving resorces.
As an example, you can download all of the logic apps to visual studio, from there create parameter files and build Azure DevOps build/release pipelines to different resource groups. Such as dev, test, uat & prod resource groups. I am using this strategy to build and govern over 300 logic apps for one of my customers. Now I started from Visual studio but you could easily download your current logic apps using the cloud explorer in visual studio or directly from the Azure portal.
One of the things you will have to look out for is the API-connections, they tend to create new ones even when not asked for.
I am doing some research for Powerapps integration with Azure DevOps.
However there is limitated information for it.
It is possible to integrate powerapps inside a Task for AzureDevops?
Based on, that we have a .zip file with the Powerapp, and we want to create a Build and Release/Deploy for several environments.
Thank You.
It is possible to integrate powerapps inside a Task for AzureDevops?
Yes it is.
You can leverage the Solution concept of the Microsoft Power Platform and the Power Apps BuildTools (preview) extension for Azure DevOps.
Update 11/2020: This is now GA and called Power Platform Build Tools
I've written a complete step-by-step guide on this topic:
A Continuous Delivery Approach for No-Code Solutions in Microsoft’s Power Platform
Bottom line:
With this build tool, you can automatically check-in a Solution into source control and deploy it using a continuous delivery approach with the help of Azure DevOps. See the screenshot for a sample configuration of the Export and Import Solution Task.
It works for everything you can organize inside a Solution, e.g.:
Power Apps
Power Automate Flows
AI Builder Models
Common Data Service Entities
It is possible to integrate powerapps inside a Task for AzureDevops?
I am afraid there is no such Task integrate powerapps for AzureDevops at this moment.
If you want to integrate powerapps with azure devops, you can follow the guide step by step:
Microsoft Teams – Integration with Visual Studio Team Services using PowerApps.
Besides, AFAIK, PowerApps should not be "Build/Deployed" through Azure Devops.
When you are developing with PowerApps, there is no way to do Source
Control. There are no source files. The only artifact you can version
control is the .zip file that you can export.
And
In PowerApps, you don’t have to build your code. Any change you make
to the application is live for you to test it. In that way it is very
productive. To publish the application you just click on the publish
button and it is live.
Check this great blog: PowerApps From A DevOps Perspective for some more details.
Hope this helps.
Solutions are a way to package your components in a single zip file and use Powerapps build tools to import your solution on to a different environment or tenant.
It is still a an improvement from manually importing each app or environment variable and then import it on to target system, but it lacks what we call as automation of deployment.
To provide an eg, I will explain what I have done, and what still constitutes of a manual task:
I created an enterprise level app using powerapp canvas model. My app consumes data from around 20 APIs. These API calls are implemented in power automate.
We have 4 environments, dev, sit, uat and prod. Now I cant keep on importing flows in each environment and change their api URLs to point to the deployed environment. So I used environment variables for each environment which stores api URLs for each environment. This can be done under solution.
Under the same solution, I added my app. So now my solution has 2 things, my app and the environment variable which consists of api URLs.
I then use powerapps build tools to move this solution from dev to sit.
Steps: use build tools tasks to perform the following
Export solution
Unpack it in git
Pack it
Import the solution.
This successfully moves my solution to sit.
But the solution environment variable still points to the dev url.
So I have to override environment variables to store sit URLs.
This manual intervention to edit environment variable is as good as doing all the tasks manually.
This was the case when PowerApps was first announced; however, this is no longer the case.
While it is technically true that there is no actual code that would be managed and deployed with a PowerApp or Flow but that doesn't mean that you can not use the power of Azure DevOps. Additionally, when creating a PowerApp / flow you would also be creating entities and even Model Driven apps - and these uses solutions - which naturally work well to deplooy within Azure DevOps.
Microsoft is building out this whole construct to enable all these to deploy...
While the whole incorporation of PowerApps and flows into Solutions is not fully baked yet - they are targeting to have this ready around the October time frame this year.
We have been talking to Microsoft about also enabling PowerApps and flows to follow the same expansion that solutions do so that they can take advantage of the full branching strategy.
So even though you would be simply exporting out zip files into your repo - you can still take advantage of the full devops pipeline which is highly recommended.
Use this component, it still on preview mode but is working fine on my side
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=microsoft-IsvExpTools.PowerApps-BuildTools
Summary
Recently migrated PB126 apps to PB2017 and changed source control to Azure DevOps Git.
Now, I'd like to integrate Azure DevOps CI/CD Build Pipeline to the app dev life-cycle.
jenkins
I know it's feasible to configure jenkins CI server so it builds PB2017 projects.
Continuous Integration with PowerBuilder 2017, Bonobo Git and Jenkins
My problem here's I can't get it to work on a local Docker container and make it accessible to the outside world (Internet) so Azure DevOps can trigger its build action. Supposedly, it's a Docker for Windows thing which Docker handles differently from the Linux-based Docker.
Azure DevOps Pipeline
As per this link, Azure Pipelines is the CI/CD solution for any language, any platform, any cloud, it says any language, which makes me believe it's feasible to build PB2017 projects using Azure DevOps Pipelines.
The fact is that I'm totally new to CI/CD in terms of implementing it myself. I've experienced it in many projects where I wasn't responsible to implement it. Now I am. I've been on it since a few days now, and I do want it to work.
Any help appreciated.
The Appeon offical user forum: https://community.appeon.com/index.php/qna/q-a