Building SQL Server Database Projects With YAML

Gavin Campbell shows how to use Visual Studio Team Services’s new YAML build pipeline to build a SQL Server Data Tools project:

The documentation for how to specify build steps in YAML is still a work in progress. In summary, the current procedure is to visit the VSTS Tasks repo on GitHub, open the folder for the task your are interested in, and take a look at the task.json.

In our case, the first task we need is MSBuild, to build the database project. Looking inside task.json, we can see that the name of the task we need is MSBuild, and that there are a huge number of available inputs we can use to configure the task; solution to specify the project or solution to build, platform, configuration, and many more. In our case, we’ll just specify the path to our .sqlproj file and let msbuild take care of the rest.

Gavin walks us through the entire process step by step, though as he notes, some of these steps are liable to change as the VSTS team continues implementation.