Implementing Azure DevOps Services with On-premise TFS Release Manager

0
votes

We have Release Management for VS 2013 running for all our builds and releases on-premise. We are not ready to publish our systems to Azure Cloud yet, but would like to migrate our source-code to Azure DevOps Services in the mean time. We are also not ready to publish via Azure DevOps Pipelines to agents installed on our servers. Is it possible to have your source-code in Azure DevOps Repos, build the source using either Microsoft-hosted or self-hosted agents and then have Release Management for VS2013 release them to our environments?

I am able to do normal published via Azure DevOps Services totally to Azure Cloud, and even to on-premises with distributed agents running on servers, with test applications, but this would mean I have to recreate every build definitions, we have created, again in Azure DevOps, and also that we would bypass our Release Management server.

We would like to stick with Release Manager for now for releases, but want to migrate our source-code and work-items into Azure DevOps and build source in Azure DevOps Pipelines.

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tfsazure-devopsrelease-management

1 Answers

1
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It's unlikely to work. Release Management Server 2013 only supported XAML builds. 2015 had support for JSON/visual designer builds, but the support wasn't particularly robust. I'm not even 100% sure that RM Server can communicate with a modern Azure DevOps instance. You're using a 6 year old tool that's been deprecated and unsupported for several years; you're not going to find a lot of options to keep it working properly with modern, supported tools.

There is a tool that can extract PowerShell deployment scripts from RM Server that can be used (with some degree of rework) in an Azure DevOps pipeline, but it's not a perfect solution. And I say that as the primary developer of that tool.