Visual Studio Team Services - Build Agent/Package Management

Question

I've started using Visual Studio Team Services as my source code control. I am now trying to setup continuous integration so that whenever we check in code, it will build the code.

For projects with dependencies that can be retrieved in Nuget libraries the projects will build fine. But once I introduce our own class library or introduce some third party dlls (that cannot be retrieved from Nuget) the build will fail.

I have noticed that the build agent does not have a bin folder, and by reading various posts and articles it says the first step to use Team Services to build is for Nuget to retrieve these dependencies.

So do I need to package our own libraries and third party dlls into our own nuget feed?

I looked over Team Services documents and they offer this feature of Package Management: https://www.visualstudio.com/docs/package/what-is-packaging

I am a bit unclear with this feature. Will this feature allow for me to create our class libraries into our own Nuget feed? I don't quite see how I would add the dll into this feed. (I understand how to get a Nuget package, but I am still reading up on creating one)

Answer 1

Managing dependency assemblies via Nuget is a recommended way to do this. With it, you don't need to check in the assemblies into Source Control and you can manage the packages in your project more convenient.

The Package Management feature in VSTS is used to manage the nuget packages. When you create a new feed in it, it will show a guide about how to use it like following:

You just need to follow the steps to add your assemblies into it and then add the package in your project.

And you can use "nuget spec" and "nuget pack" command to create the nuget package. Refer to this link for details: Creating and Publishing a Package.

However, if you don't want to use Nuget, you can simply add the DLL reference in your project and check in these DLL files into Source Control which is not recommended.