Azure DevOps is my Favorite Tool

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have always liked Azure DevOps since we moved to it. It has everything a developer needs. Our GitLab account had everything we needed to hold our repositories. However, we didn’t know how to take advantage of its CI/CD pipeline. I also used Asana to manage my projects and their numerous tasks. I loved Asana, but it was external to GitLab’s. I was constantly juggling websites to get my work done. It was getting tedious, and I forgot things. Something had to change.

I was excited to learn that we were moving to Azure and Azure DevOps. It has all I need, ways to manage your repository, CD/CI, tests, tasks, boards, wiki, and integration to everything Microsoft (at least to Teams and Visual Studio). With some training classes and lots of experimenting, we flow from local to Development, Test, and Production instances.

What I like about Azure DevOps are the boards. I love that I can track and update tasks. My boss can add tasks and see where I’m at without bugging me with a status update. I can also post questions to my boss about a particular task, responding to it. It’s all stored on the board and not email. Goodbye to lost in email hell. Fantastic!

I now figured out how to see and update those same tasks within Visual Studio 2022. The only thing I have not figured out is how to tag someone in a conversation. For example, I would use the @ symbol on the DevOps and start typing the user’s name. It would IntelliSense the correct contact and fill it in, but in Visual Studio, it doesn’t seem to have that feature. Perhaps a future update will have it.

Now not every team member likes using the system. They want to code and push their changes and that’s it. They are not into Kaban boards and wiki’s for documenting their web apps. What a shame. I think it makes you a better developer. All I can say is that I love it!

By the way, you can get a free account to learn Azure and Azure DevOps. I encourage you to check it out and give it a try.

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