The main way to perform continuous integration is by using a continuous integration build. In Azure DevOps, builds can be configured as part of the Azure Pipelines offering. There are currently two approaches available for creating a build definition:

• Via the visual designer (also called classic builds and releases)
• Through Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) files (also called YAML pipelines or multistage pipelines)

The rest of this section focuses on the visual designer. The following section, YAML build definitions, will go into more detail about YAML pipelines. Both approaches support roughly the same capabilities, although there are some differences. Some features that are available in classic builds and releases are not (yet) available in YAML build definitions. Also, some new features are only provided to YAML pipelines.

If you have no experience with pipelines, the classic editor is a good way to get familiar with the workings of continuous integration/continuous development pipelines before moving on to YAML pipelines. Almost all of the concepts in classic builds translate to YAML builds as well.

In the following sections, we will start by building a classic build pipeline.