Original reporting credit: winbuzzer.com
Overview
Microsoft announced the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension — a DevLabs release aimed at Visual Studio 2017 users. The extension simplifies the process of setting up automated build, test, and release pipelines for ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Core applications that target Azure, reducing the friction between writing code and deploying it to production.
What the Extension Does
Continuous Delivery Tools integrates directly into Visual Studio 2017 and connects to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to provide the following capabilities:
- Automated pipeline setup: Developers can configure CI/CD pipelines — covering build, test, and release stages — without leaving the IDE.
- Automatic build definition detection: When a repository is loaded in Visual Studio, the extension automatically selects the first CI-configured build definition associated with that repository. Users can also manually choose a different build definition to monitor.
- Real-time build status notifications: Build status is surfaced through an IDE status bar icon. To minimize noise, only build failures trigger a notification, allowing developers to catch problems as soon as they occur without being flooded with alerts on successful runs.
- Environment-specific deployment configuration: The extension supports configuring separate Dev and Test environments, as well as more controlled workflows such as manual approval gates for staging and production deployments.
Supported Targets
The extension supports deploying ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core projects to two Azure hosting options:
- Azure App Service — for traditional web application hosting.
- Azure Container Service — for containerized workloads.
How to Configure Continuous Delivery
Setting up the extension follows a straightforward workflow within Visual Studio 2017:
- Open an ASP.NET project in Visual Studio 2017.
- Navigate to the Project menu.
- Select Configure Continuous Delivery.
- Follow the prompts to automate Build and Release definitions in VSTS.
- Optionally configure environment-specific stages, including manual approval steps for staging and production.
Why This Matters for DevOps Teams
One persistent challenge in DevOps adoption is the context-switching cost of leaving the development environment to configure deployment infrastructure. By embedding pipeline configuration directly inside Visual Studio, Microsoft reduces that friction for .NET teams already working within the Microsoft ecosystem. Developers can set up continuous integration builds that automate testing, static analysis, and verification — and configure continuous deployment so that validated builds reach users faster.
The notification model — surfacing only failures in the status bar — reflects a pragmatic design choice: developers need to know when something breaks, not be continuously reminded that everything is working as expected.
Visual Studio 2017 Context
At the time of this announcement, Visual Studio 2017 was still in Release Candidate status. A recent RC update (Build 26127.00) had introduced several notable changes alongside the Continuous Delivery Tools announcement:
- The .NET Core and ASP.NET Core workloads moved out of preview, signaling a more stable foundation for cross-platform development.
- An improved Team Explorer connect experience made it easier to browse and connect to projects and repositories in VSTS.
Together, these changes positioned Visual Studio 2017 as a more capable end-to-end DevOps workstation for .NET developers working with Azure and VSTS.