Completed the ASP.NET Web API build pipeline

At last I have managed to complete the build process for our ASP.NET Web API services. The build process uses Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015 vNext and offers complete Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. Each check-in triggers a build which performs the following steps:

- Versions the assemblies (using a Powershell script)
- Performs a solution build
- Runs all unit tests
- Publishes the results from the unit tests (to the Team Foundation Server 2015 dashboard)
- Runs dotCover (from JetBrains) to give code coverage (currently at 88% coverage)
- Copies all unit tests and code coverage results to an IIS virtual directory so the results can be accessed anywhere from a browser
- Performs a build of the start-up project and creates a set of build articles ready for publishing
- Copies the published build articles to a known location on the TFS 2015 server ready for deployment (see next step)

When the build is complete, it automatically triggers a deployment to the development (staging) server ready for testing.

- The published build articles are deployed to the development server

Deployment to the production server is an ad hoc manual task for obvious reasons i.e. we don't want to publish un-tested code onto a production server.

From code check-in to deployment onto the development server, the entire process is automatic and seamless. All build output is pushed through our dedicated build-notification Slack channel.

I am very impressed with TFS 2015 and have found setting up and configuring a CI / CD pipeline to be quite straight forward. We are now looking into using the Agile features of TFS 2015 for managing our projects / workload. So next task is to look into creating epics, user-stories, sprints etc with TFS 2015. That will be for a future articles.