Awesome Azure DevOps resources

I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s Azure DevOps. As a developer, it’s a single place that allows me to do everything. It stores my code, tracks my project ideas and current work, builds and deploys my applications, stores my artifacts, and more. And the best part, it’s all free (well, if you’re a team of 5 people or less). Typically I store my open source repositories on GitHub and my closed source projects in Azure DevOps. That’s not a problem though, because Azure DevOps has awesome integration with GitHub, and again, most of the services are free when used with open source projects. I’m grateful that we also use Azure DevOps at my organization, so I’m able to leverage all of the awesomeness in my day-to-day job as well. Sure, it may not be perfect, but the teams are improving it all the time, and continually asking for community feedback.

With that said, here’s a quick list of some of my favourite Azure DevOps resources to help me stay up-to-date on the constantly evolving product:

• Azure DevOps Labs: Tons of labs/tutorials showing at-a-glance many of the things Azure DevOps can do. You can then drill into the ones that interest you for step-by-step instructions to accomplish your task, or to just learn more about the features that Azure DevOps offers.
• Official features timeline: The past features that Azure DevOps has delivered, the versions they went into, as well as the short(ish)-term roadmap of the larger features they’re planning to deliver. This is great because it allows you to see if any of your wishlist items are on their short-term roadmap.
• Official release notes: On the same parent page as the link above, here you can see all of the features that Azure DevOps has delivered on in past sprints. Be sure to bookmark this page to stay up-to-date on all the new goodness that comes out every few weeks, as sometimes amazing enhancements get released under the radar. This page will help you stay current so you don’t miss critical updates.
• Radio TFS podcast: A frequent podcast that talks about all things DevOps. I’m personally not a big podcast guy, and have only ever listened to one or two of the talks. I frequent this site for the links that get posted from the talks. There’s always links to great blog posts and other resources. It’s a great place to find out about community driven projects and non-Microsoft things that integrate with Azure DevOps.
• Azure DevOps team official blog: This is another awesome resource to find out about changes recently implemented or coming down the pipe for Azure DevOps, as well as other community projects and blog posts.
• Channel 9 DevOps-Lab: If you’re more into watching videos than reading blogs, this is a great channel to subscribe to. It focuses on performing DevOps operations using Microsoft technologies; mostly, but not entirely limited to, Azure DevOps.
• YouTube DevOps channel: Another great channel to subscribe to for videos. This one actually includes the Channel 9 video feed mentioned above, as well as many other DevOps related videos; not all of them are about Azure DevOps.

• Official community feedback page: The Developer Community is the official place to file bug reports and make feature requests for Azure DevOps. In addition to filing new reports, you can also browse and up-vote existing ones. I’ve used this service many times to get help with issues I’ve had, and it’s cool to see some of the other feature requests I didn’t know I wanted until reading about them. You can also navigate here directly from your Azure DevOps page by accessing the Help section.

  

• @AzureDevOps: Following @AzureDevOps on Twitter is another great way to learn about cool new features. The best part is, they’re interactive! If you’re not sure about something or have a question, send them a tweet and they’ll try to help you out. I’ve tweeted them many times in the past, and more often than not I get a response back within a day or two. There are also many other noteworthy people on Twitter, such as the members that make up the #LoECDA; it would be too hard to list them all and keep it current.

Do you have any other great Azure DevOps resources? Let me know in the comments!