Azure DevOps Extensions Build Version Updater
Azure DevOps Extensions are powerful add-ons that enable you to customize and extend your DevOps experience with both Azure DevOps Server (on-premises) and Azure DevOps Services (cloud-based). These extensions seamlessly integrate into your existing pipelines, repositories, boards, and test plans, providing additional functionality that addresses specific workflow requirements and automation needs beyond the platform's core capabilities.
Extensions bridge the gap between Azure DevOps' built-in features and your unique development processes. Whether you need specialized build tasks, custom release pipeline steps, enhanced work item tracking, dashboard widgets, or third-party service integrations, extensions provide the flexibility to adapt Azure DevOps to your exact requirements rather than forcing your processes to conform to default functionality.
These extensions are developed using standard, widely-adopted web technologies including HTML and CSS for markup and visual presentation, TypeScript for type-safe client-side logic and modern JavaScript development, and PowerShell for automation scripts, build tasks, and server-side operations. This accessibility means extensions can be created, maintained, and customized using familiar tools and languages that most development teams already possess, without requiring specialized or proprietary development environments.
Build Version Updater Task
Build Version Updater is a specialized task designed to automatically update version variables within your Azure DevOps Build or Release Pipeline, solving a common challenge in continuous integration and deployment workflows.
In a CI (Continuous Integration) environment, this task becomes invaluable for automatically incrementing version numbers after each successful build or release. Rather than manually updating version variables or relying on external scripts, the Build Version Updater seamlessly integrates into your pipeline to handle version management systematically and consistently.
This automation significantly reduces the effort required to pass version information down the line when building DLLs, NuGet packages, assemblies, or deployment artifacts with predefined versioning schemes. The task eliminates manual intervention, prevents version conflicts, ensures sequential version numbering, and maintains accurate version history across your continuous delivery pipeline.
The practical benefits extend beyond simple automation. Consistent versioning enables better traceability of which code changes are included in specific builds, simplifies rollback procedures when issues arise, supports semantic versioning strategies automatically, and ensures that all components of multi-project solutions maintain synchronized version numbers when needed.
By integrating version management directly into your pipeline as a task, you avoid the complexity of custom PowerShell scripts scattered across multiple pipelines, reduce configuration errors from manual version updates, and create a standardized approach to versioning across all your projects.
You can find a video of how to use this Nuget Package here.
For more details on how to install and configure this extension click here.