Last month Microsoft finally put the new VSTS (formerly VSO) Release Management into public preview.  If you haven’t checked it out yet then just navigate to your Team Project and you should see a new top level menu option – Release*

The asterisk means that it is still in preview.

We’ve been using this for a while in our own internal development while it was in private preview and we think our clients are going to love it.

At the minute, this web based UI is VSTS only and it didn’t make it into TFS 2015 Update 1 so fingers crossed for Update 2.  If you want to read more about upcoming features for VSTS and TFS then check out the Visual Studio Team Services Features Timeline.

VSTS Release Management can target both on-premise machines and cloud based VMs or Websites so you’ll probably want to hook up your MSDN Azure subscription to VSTS if you haven’t already.

Navigate to the admin page for your Team Project by clicking the gear icon and then select the Services tab.  The url will be something like this:

https://<accountname>.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/<ProjectName>/_admin/_services

Add a New Service Endpoint and select Azure

Then you will need your MSDN Azure subscription details to complete this so grab your subscription ID, subscription name and management certificate by downloading your publish settings:

https://manage.windowsazure.com/publishsettings/

Copy everything between the quotes:

and paste it into the new Azure Connection dialog.  Give the connection a name to help you recognise it in case there are multiple Azure connections associated with the project.

Click OK and your account should be ready to deploy.

Now when I create my Azure Web App Deployment, my Azure Subscription will be available in the drop down

Cheers,

Richard