Azure is well-suited to publicly releasing developer-oriented artifacts like NuGet packages. And it's great at deploying Web-Apps and things intended for VMs. Plenty of release templates for those. But I can't find much discussion on deploying a simple standard Windows desktop application installer. Does such a facility exist?
Because our pipelines produce two main artifacts we give to customers:
Getting #1 out there is easy. But what do I do about #2?
I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe something like an Azure-provided publicly-facing page with a list of installer builds I had released. Something my pipeline could feed into directly. Maybe even some provision to require people to enter contact information to download the installer, or a customer-specific URL that would record for us who had downloaded it.
Does this sort of Azure facility exist? Or is this a case where we should just expose a downloads page directly from our own company website?
Is there an Azure Pipeline facility for releasing a standard Desktop Application?
I am afraid there is no such specific Azure Pipeline facility for releasing a standard Desktop Application.
When we release a standard Desktop Application, we could use the copy task or publish build artifact task to deploy standard Desktop Application build artifact, to a network drive folder or target machine directly.
You could check this document and my previous thread for some details.
So,there is no such specific Azure Pipeline facility for standard Desktop Application.
If you really want to use artifacts to manage standard Desktop Application, you could try to use the Universal Package, which store one or more files together in a single unit that has a name and version. we could also publish Universal Packages and download it.