toxicbakery

That sounds like a great improvement to the process!

I'm not sure what you mean by this but a few other people have asked me about the described screen size problem so I decided to add some clarification.

https://toxicbakery.github.io/vsts-devops/dimensions/

It is likely that this is a variant of the issue with secure files. Secure files require a song and dance around changing the default branch or committing directly to a default branch to trigger a build after setup of the secure file. Coming from CI systems like Travis and Circle, this is an extremely confusing approach that I hope they consider changing.

In the opening paragraphs I stated it was my hope that this gives me a gateway to communicate with someone that isn't support and isn't the void that is their robot response issue tracker.

That said, they generously reached out to me and appear to genuinely be concerned by my experience. I plan to keep posting as I run into issues and also as they correct my mistakes and also solve my problems.

I initially thought the same thing but I'm less convinced of that after trying an aws based build agent. I think the agents themselves may have a bug that combined with our pipeline needs, triggers some perfect storm issue. At the same time, we have seen builds fail to start at all and and sometimes fail to even checkout from GitHub.

Funny enough I had not had the time to write about this yet. This resolves one of the other issues on my list. Thank you.

The majority of the product indeed does work pretty well. We make heavy use of their Boards and Test Plan features and outside of specific but minor UI/UX complaints, it is a competent tool.

You are correct, I'm just an Android dev but the company I work for is a long time user of Microsoft products like Visual Studio and obviously Windows. Over time, if anything, we have become more invested in their products and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future as they generally work well for our use cases.

You got me, I use Linux :)

I'm interested to hear you have not had the same CI issues I have. One theory I have with no substantiating evidence is that Linux agents are least commonly used. The Linux agents on hosted builds run in a hypervisor but I've seemingly had the same issues running self hosted agents (as I mentioned AWS).

I can't find an actual issue and again as I mentioned in the post, replacing my AWS instance with a new AWS instance also eventually hit the same issue. Maybe it's some perfect storm of problems but that is just more speculation.

Horrifically broken was an exaggeration, you are correct. Much of this was written after a stressful day compounded by dealing with our CI failing to do the thing it is supposed to do. I also agree with you that Microsoft has been making great strides in the direction of "getting a lot of things right lately" as you said.