Building a Windows application in a CI/CD pipeline

Most of the documentation and stories related to CI/CD that you read on the internet are about server-side applications: cloud services, APIs, and web applications. One of the reasons (of course, other than because they're very popular and widely adopted) is that they're a perfect fit to build a solid CI/CD story, especially when it comes to deployment. These kinds of applications are hosted on a server, which is exposed through an HTTP endpoint. With the power of the cloud, you can quickly create new servers as needed; for instance, PaaS services such as Azure App Services give you advanced scaling and staging capabilities. Thanks to all of these features, it's quite straightforward to define a pipeline that can automatically deploy a new version of the software in one or more environments, such as a staging server, a production server, and more.

When it comes to Windows desktop applications, it's more challenging...