An inclement weekend has given me a chance to spend some time improving the build and publish story for one of my Visual Studio extensions - Show Missing, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about using GitHub Actions to implement a nice CI/CD story.

I previously had set up AppVeyor and Azure Pipelines configurations to build this project. I thought this would be a good opportunity to consolidate automated build and deployment using GitHub Actions and add some nice enhancements to the process along the way.

The project source is located in this repository on GitHub. I’m going to blog about each of the changes I made. At this stage I’m planning to cover:

  1. Building with GitHub Actions
  2. Optimise build with caching
  3. Adding Dependabot
  4. Create releases
  5. Attach binary to release
  6. Create a new GitHub Action for deleting release assets
  7. Publish release to the Visual Studio Marketplace

I’ll add links to subsequent posts as they are published.