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Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

toxicbakery.github.io

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Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#141

Post by ToFab123 »

ethomson wrote: post #120
ToFab123 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can I only choose github as my repository when creating a new devops project? It used to be possible to use vsts (git)

Sorry, I don't understand what you're seeing here - you're creating a new project in Azure DevOps? When you do this, you get the choice between Git (hosted in Azure Repos) or centralized version control (TFVC hosted in Azure Repos). We don't have an option to do anything with GitHub here. So I think that I'm not understanding what you're creating, or where. Can you drop me an email with a screenshot? It's my HN usern…

I will clarify. if you go to portal.azure.com --> Create a resource --> DevOps project --> Bring your own code --> In code repository you can choose between "GitHub" or "External Git". What I expected was that I could point it at VisualStudio.com - unless vsts has become the external git? ps: happy azure devops / azure user here ;)

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#142

Post by Angostura »

vezycash wrote: post #112
tinus_hn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These large cut and paste answers with completely irrelevant instructions and a lot of begging for points. Totally useless and infuriating if you've spent a lot of time writing a good report.

Microsoft could further save money by building an answer bot. It'll cost less, answer faster and wouldn't be any worse than the current outsourced indian community support staff.

I assumed that they already had, but that it wasn’t very good

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#143

Post by plasma »

ethomson wrote: post #115
withinrafael wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Development MVP here. I feel like I must shoulder some of the responsibility here for not being louder about these issues. But must say, I'm disappointed to hear you're "surprised" about the UX issues. I've been telling your folks the UX is dreadful (e.g. as far back as pre-launch) and kept hearing back "we know, we're fixing it". I'll start formalizing the feedback and push it through the pipes, stay tuned.…

I'm not in Redmond, but do send an email. I'm my HN name @microsoft.com. We should be able to sort out some of these issues for you. I'd like to hear more about the docs problem. But: You should be able to recurse submodules in a pipeline. In the visual designer, select "Checkout Submodules" in the pipeline's get sources step. If you use YAML, set "submodules: true" or "submodules: recursive" in the checkout keyword.…

Hey, just one bit of feedback, I tried getting my github linked project to build late last year, but always failed to checkout sub modules.

The build log showed permission issues, and I did try workarounds suggested like changing the sub module URL and adding ssh keys as part of the checkout step, but in the end, my 8 hours allocated to “get vsts building” ended with this problem and I have not continued. The performance of builds was also poor.

It’s unfortunately burnt me enough that I’m just making an ec2 instance with teamcity.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#144

Post by toxicbakery »

plasma wrote: post #143
ethomson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in Redmond, but do send an email. I'm my HN name @microsoft.com. We should be able to sort out some of these issues for you. I'd like to hear more about the docs problem. But: You should be able to recurse submodules in a pipeline. In the visual designer, select "Checkout Submodules" in the pipeline's get sources step. If you use YAML, set "submodules: true" or "submodules: recursive" in the checkout keyword.…

Hey, just one bit of feedback, I tried getting my github linked project to build late last year, but always failed to checkout sub modules. The build log showed permission issues, and I did try workarounds suggested like changing the sub module URL and adding ssh keys as part of the checkout step, but in the end, my 8 hours allocated to “get vsts building” ended with this problem and I have not continued. The perform…

It is likely that this is a variant of the issue with secure files. Secure files require a song and dance around changing the default branch or committing directly to a default branch to trigger a build after setup of the secure file. Coming from CI systems like Travis and Circle, this is an extremely confusing approach that I hope they consider changing.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#146

Post by nathanaldensr »

thejosh wrote: post #23
ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

Azure Devops is something I want to love. The UI keeps changing, but doesn't fix underlying bugs that have been around for ages. Multiple issues where the builds don't actually update in the browser when they go through the steps (f5 only fixes), the builds show out of order in the UI, and many many other wonky things. Also releases aren't YAML yet. Builds are, and are a good feature. Azure Devops is almost perfect,…

YAML build definitions are not supported for GitHub Enterprise, which is mystifying to me seeing as how they are supported for GitHub. This is a critical missing feature for us and will leave us having to manually create huge JSON blobs for submission to the API.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#147

Post by Orphis »

ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

I've migrated my Boost builds from Travis and Appveyor to your CI offering recently. It wasn't super smooth, but I got it to work quite fast and I like it a lot.

So sure, I'm missing caching that I've had on Travis. But honestly, it builds reliably fast anyway. On Travis, I always needed to wait a LONG time to get macOS agents, on Appveyor, we were limited to 2 parallel builds. Here, everything starts all at once, completes under 10 minutes (there's quite a lot to build and test).

If I could, I would love to have an sccache ( https://github.com/mozilla/sccache ) compatible distributed free caching solution for my C++ projects. That'd be a killer feature!

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#148

Post by robbyt »

raxxorrax wrote: post #106

Interesting post. I feel for him using this tool. Had my own experience with team foundation server on premise. Although a different tool, many of the problems seem quite similar. A little rant: To the cloud infrastructure of MS: I don't know if anyone uses it for anything serious and doesn't complain about severe performance issues not only related to builds, but everything. From administrative sites to hosted envir…

I felt the same way when I worked on a large Azure project years ago. It seemed that nobody uses it for anything serious, reliability was awful (their API would return 500s in the middle of the day, no notice of downtime, VMs would lose network connectivity, disks would take 30+ minutes to attach, and much more).

The client I was working with is very big and notable, so they had lots of help from Microsoft, and even so, there were so many problems with the service. I'd hate to see how smaller customers are treated.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#149

Post by interblag »

ethomson wrote: post #121
ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

There's a lot of comments about our UI and I thought I'd post a quick followup here instead of replying to each one individually. We are definitely reading these comments. UI itself is polarizing, and changing a UI moreso, but there's a lot of critical feedback here that we're going to investigate, try to understand and improve.

Really appreciate you engaging here - in addition I think there would be a lot of value in taking a closer look at the feedback that you're already getting on user voice, especially for issues that you think you've closed.

Great example here: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-team-servic...

It looks like you did something that users didn't actually ask for in 2017, closed this, and then have been ignoring 1.5 years worth of comments being told what users actually want. From our end it's simple - the embedded burndown chart on the scrum board should be able to show story points, not just hours (like with any other scrum board tool). I shudder to think how many engineering hours went into solving the wrong thing here...

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#150

Post by jhacker123 »

I'm using Azure DevOps (Previously VSTS) more than two years, and meanwhile I create couple of Pipeline to perform CI/CD.

> .NET MVC Web Application Build and Deploy Using FTP > .NET MVC Web Application Deploy in Cloud (Both Azure and AWS) > .NET MVC Web Application Build on Linux Visual Studio Agent Create Docker Image and Published

I didn't face any errors from devops, my experience overall good with DevOps. but i agree that it's not user friendly in term of UI and other workflow.

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