Let's carry out the following steps to create our Azure DevOps project:
- Azure DevOps can be found at https://dev.azure.com/. We can create an account for free if we haven't got one already. To create a new project, click the New project button on the home page and enter a name for the project in the panel that appears. We can choose to make our project public or private before clicking the Create button:
- Azure DevOps contains several areas, but we are focused on its pipeline feature. So, let's click on Pipelines in the left-hand navigation menu and then click on New pipeline.
- We will be asked to specify where our code repository is hosted:
Click on the appropriate option. Azure DevOps will go through an authorization process to allow Azure DevOps to access our repositories.
- Then, we will be prompted to choose a specific repository for our code and authorize access to it:
- Azure DevOps will inspect the code in the repository so that it can suggest an appropriate CI template for the technology in play. Let's select the ASP.NET Core template:
Don't choose the ASP.NET Core (.NET Framework) template. You may need to click the Show more button to find the ASP.NET Core template.
- Then, a build pipeline is created for us from the template. The steps in the pipeline are defined in an azure-pipelines.yml file, which will be added to our source code repository. We will make changes to this file in the next section, Implementing CI, but, for now, let's click the Save and run button:
- Click on the Save and run button in the confirmation panel that appears. The pipeline will be saved and a build will be triggered. The build will fail, but don't worry about that—we'll resolve this in the next section, Implementing CI.
- Click on the Builds navigation option in the Pipelines section. We'll see the build history, along with an Edit option, which we can use to change build steps. There is also a Queue option, which allows us to manually trigger a build:
That's our Azure DevOps project created. It contains a build pipeline from the ASP.NET Core template. In the next section, we'll fully implement the build pipeline.