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Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

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Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#61

Post by avinium »

taspeotis wrote: post #49
avinium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this has been my experience. I haven't had a build agent disappear, but lack of build caching is very frustrating. The hosted build agents are slow to begin with, let alone needing 5 minutes for every build to restore packages. AFAIK there's no way to "only run changed tests" too. EDIT: Forgot to add that, despite the above, I'm pretty happy with it. The whole VSTS experience (Wiki/code/PRs/etc) is pretty great…

> AFAIK there's no way to "only run changed tests" too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/test...

That looks great - must have overlooked that last time I checked.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#62

Post by stonogo »

WorldMaker wrote: post #40
GordonS wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Azure DevOps for around 2 years, and TFS for several. Most of what this article says, I simply don't see in (almost) every day usage. The single issue I agree with is the lack of caching - installing NPM packages can take up to 15 minutes in the worst case. MS have known about this for years, so I honestly don't understand why they haven't done something about it. I also think the hosted build machine…

Regarding caching, with NPM you actually have a couple good options (best together): 1.) Make sure you are using `npm ci` instead of `npm install`. The `ci` install command is often much faster and skips a lot of stuff that `install` does. It's also better at sticking purely to your package-lock.json versions. I suggested on UserVoice at one point that Azure Pipelines should switch to `npm ci` as the npm task default…

Why on earth would you use a different deployment stack in CI than you would in production? This seems to miss (at least) half the point of integration testing.

Making this decision is bad enough, but making it because you've chosen a bad CI/CD stack is even worse. Use the tools that work, instead of breaking things to match.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#63

Post by rb666 »

eckza wrote: post #60
MisterKent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old UI was better, and forcing people to this weird pretty UI doesn't make sense. Several products aimed at tech people seem to make this mistake. We are power users, we don't want stuff hidden away. Stop having UX that's designed as if we were trying to browse twitter.

Looking right at you, JIRA.

If you wouldn't hide certain things within JIRA you would go completely bonkers. JIRA allows you to fully customize the interface regardless.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#65

Post by withinrafael »

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…

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 also local (Bellevue), would love to come in and try to pipeline our relatively simple oss .net/wpf/uwp app. I suspect it'll be an eye opener for the both of us.

Some examples:

* You can't build a pipeline with a git repo. that contains submodules

* Found it impossible to edit the PATH for some custom tooling

* The New Pipeline experience just doesn't make a lot of sense, new users clicking around will eventually end up at the wrong Docs.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#66

Post by Meph504 »

MisterKent wrote: post #19
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…

The old UI was better, and forcing people to this weird pretty UI doesn't make sense. Several products aimed at tech people seem to make this mistake. We are power users, we don't want stuff hidden away. Stop having UX that's designed as if we were trying to browse twitter.

This is spot on, I've been using tfso or devops, brand of the month. I hate the New UI, its really clear that the people are focus on making something that doesn't need to be pretty, pretty at the expense of functionality.

For example, when you go to do a release and you of course want to do release notes, previously you could copy and paste the related issues output into any document.

Now its been CSSified to be big, bubbly, and utterly useless to do anything but look at, and there is no print or export feature.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#68

Post by kkarakk »

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…

>though we're working on this now

beetlejuice,beetlejuice,BEETLEJUICE!

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#69

Post by kkarakk »

throw_away2 wrote: post #67
mattbillenstein wrote: post #64

How do all of you people get on this broken stuff on Azure with GCP and AWS (I think) being so good? Is it like free credits?

I can only assume windows people are used to pain

pretty much it, also azure is slightly better at pricing in asia
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