An important part of a build definition is its outcomes. Builds are often used to produce one or more artifacts that are later used for the deployment of an application. Examples of artifacts can be executables or installer files. These files need to be made available for use after the pipeline has completed.

The Publish Build Artifacts task that is shown in the preceding screenshot is a task that is specifically designed to do this. It allows you to select a file or directory and publish it under an artifact name. The result of this is that the file(s) in the selected path is retained with every execution of the pipeline for manual download or use in a release definition later. Release definitions are discussed in the next chapter, Chapter 4, Continuous Deployment.

Next, we'll learn how to integrate our pipeline with other tools and configure our service connection.