Doing things manually can be useful for getting things done, but in the software industry we call this style of working quick-and-dirty, and in many cases, once you remove the quick, all you get is the dirty. 

Deploying your application without an automatic build and release pipeline in the production environment is something you could pay for in the future. These are some of the common issues you might encounter:

• Issues in production can't be easily traced to the code version
• Debugging in production and debugging dump files is hard or impossible
• Human errors in repeatable tasks are hard to overcome
• When working in a team, knowledge transfer becomes hard

This list is not exhaustive, but I'm sure you get the picture. The solution to the aforementioned problems is quite easy — you need to create an automated environment for building and deploying your code. There are a few products that allow you to create a build and release pipeline that you can choose from—Jenkins (https://jenkins.io/), Bitbucket pipelines (https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines), AppVeyor (https://www.appveyor.com/), Azure DevOps (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/), and others. For this book, I chose to use Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS) because it provides a free plan, is easy to use, and has a lot of powerful features.

To get started, you need to create an account:

1. Go to https://azure.microsoft.com/services/devops/ and sign up for a free account. 

2. After you have logged in to your account, you'll be asked to create an organization and select the location in which your DevOps projects will be hosted:

3. Inside your organization, you can work on multiple projects. Azure DevOps provides a source control for each project you create, but you don't have to use it. You can define your project as Public and allow anonymous access to your source code, or Private, to allow only authorized users you define to access the code, the build and release pipeline, and other areas of your project.

The project you create is currently empty, but not for long. In the next section, you will create the build pipeline that will automate the way you build your application and create artifacts that can be used in the production environment.