Exploring advanced YAML

In the first part, we will take a look at advanced YAML methods. Specifically, we will discuss variables, parameters, loops, and conditions. Those are important to make your pipeline more robust and dynamic. By using them, your pipelines can handle more or less any scenario and requirement your project could encounter. You could even easily create template pipelines for reuse in different projects, without the need to redo them for each of those projects.

Variables and parameters

So far, the pipelines we created in Chapter 10 have been very static. For example, the name of the solution was hardcoded. This means the pipeline isn’t reusable without changing some parts. Another part that usually should be dynamic is whether we want to perform an update or upgrade when importing solutions, or use settings files or not.

We will learn more about settings files in the next section.

When it comes to pipelines, there are two different types of dynamic...