StartHere.md

Jumping into .NET Infrastructure

The purpose of this document is to provide a jumping off point for repository owners looking to start upgrading their infrastructure to .NET. It will provide a general overview of the direction .NET infrastructure is going and a general outline of steps you should take to get started with the upgrade, with links to appropriate detailed documentation.

What are we doing?

With every new major product cycle, we take the chance to upgrade our infrastructure based on what we learned in the previous product cycle. The goal is to produce a better product more efficiently in the next product cycle. .NET is no different, though in many ways the infrastructure changes we are making are much more an overhaul than normal. Generally, we are focusing in 3 areas:

• Shared tooling (Arcade) - Striving to reduce duplication of tooling, improve development consistency between repos and drive tooling improvements across a wider swath of the ecosystem more quickly.
• Transitioning to Azure DevOps for public CI, and upgrading official builds
  • Move away from Jenkins, improve CI reliability, increase the consistency between our official and PR builds, and bring first-class workflow for internal as well as public changes.
• Improving our inter-repo dependency version management (Darc) - Improve the rate at which dependencies are updated in repos, improve content traceability, etc.

Does my repository need to be involved?

Generally, if your repo is shipping in .NET, yes. For 'Tier 1' repos a full transition is required. While there exist some special cases (e.g. repos used as submodules in aspnet/universe), we're striving to move as many people towards the new infrastructure as possible.

• If you use .NET CI (ci.dot.net, ci2.dot.net, ci3.dot.net) you'll need to move into Azure DevOps.
• If you pull new dependencies from other repos (e.g. latest Microsoft.NETCore.App package), you'll need to onboard onto Arcade and dependency flow.
• If you publish dependencies used by other repos, you'll need to onboard onto Arcade, so that other repos may consume your outputs.

I'm ready to get started, what do I do?

See the Arcade Onboarding guide.

Additionally, the WinForms team has documented their path to adopt Arcade from scratch, including moving their repositories public. Their guide can be found here: Arcade - Starting from Scratch

Where can I find general information on .NET infrastructure?

There is quite a bit of documentation living under the Documentation folder in the dotnet/arcade repo. Here are some highlights

Concepts and Goals

• Arcade overview
• Arcade communications
• How dependency flow works in .NET
• Guidance for defaults
• Versioning rules
• Dependencies Flow Plan: Flowing dependencies with Darc, Maestro and BAR.
• How to Create an Arcade Package
• .NET Core Infrastructure Ecosystem Overview
• Toolset Publish/Consume Contract
• Servicing
• Toolsets
• Version Querying and Updating
• How Arcade tests itself

Tools we are using and how we are using them

Code and repository configuration

• The Arcade Build SDK
• GitHub and Azure Repos
  • Mirroring public projects
  • Git Sync Tools
  • Bots and connectors
• Dependency Description Format
• How to See What's the Latest Version of an Arcade Package

Building projects

• Telemetry
• MSBuild Task Packages
• Azure Pipelines: Orchestrating continuous integration
  • Goals
  • Onboarding to Azure DevOps
  • Choosing a Machine Pool
  • Migrating from phase to job in Pipeline build definitions
  • Tasks and Templates
• Darc: Arcade's dependency management system
• Maestro: CI automation of dependency flow
• Mission Control

Testing projects

• Helix: SDK, JobSender
• Azure Agent pools and queues
• Docker support
• Dump file retrieval

Deploying projects

• Packaging
• Publishing
• SignTool (and Microbuild)
• BAR

I need help, who should I talk to?

Contact 'dnceng' for additional guidance. Either @dotnet/dnceng on GitHub, or dnceng@microsoft.com

Frequently Asked Questions

See the FAQ.