Setting up a CI/CD pipeline for .NET-based applications

A typical .NET-based application includes applications developed using Microsoft's .NET Framework and uses a SQL database in the backend. You may have multiple layers of applications, such as a frontend, backend (also known as the middle tier or API tier), and data tier (SQL Server).

Azure Pipelines, which is part of Azure DevOps, provides a comprehensive solution to build, deploy, and manage your .NET-based infrastructure deployments. In this section, we'll look at the steps to configure CI/CD for a sample .NET-based application.

We will be creating two environments, named staging and production, for the application and setup of a CI/CD pipeline.

Introduction to the sample application

We'll be using a simple ToDo application for this walkthrough. It's a web-based application that uses a SQL database in the backend.

It is built using Microsoft ASP.NET, targeted for .NET Framework version 4...