Introducing CI/CD pipelines

Let's start with the basic concepts. What is a pipeline? It's a series of actions that are executed in an automated way on a build machine, which can be hosted on the cloud or on-premises.

The goal of a pipeline is to automate all the steps that you typically do on your own development machine when you want to release your software, such as building the solution with Visual Studio, generating a distributable package, publishing it on a website, and more. Typically, in DevOps, you have two types of pipelines:

• The CI pipeline takes care of building and testing your application, to make sure that the code can be built successfully and that you haven't introduced any regression.
• The CD pipeline takes care of taking the output of the CI pipeline (such as an MSIX package) and deploying it on the distribution platform of your choice (such as a web server or Microsoft Store).

In both cases, we're calling them continuous...