How to publish artifacts separately for each project in solution from VSTS CI pipeline?

Question

In my solution, I have two projects (a Asp.net MVC and a Windows Service). I want to create CI/CD pipeline to deploy web application and windows service on different VMs. But to achieve this my CI pipeline should be able to publish artifacts separately for both project and then I can feed these artifacts in CD pipeline for deployment. How artifacts for all projects can be published separately in a CI pipeline ?

PS: If I create two solutions each with one project only and create CI/CD pipeline separately, all works fine. But I want to achieve it with solution having multiple project as mentioned above.

Answer 1

You can use multiple, Publish tasks to create multiple artifacts in a single build definition.

For example lets say, you have below, as your current artifacts for a single project, comprising of _PublishedWebsites\MVS5WebApp (XCopy deployable website) and _PublishedWebsites\MVS5WebApp_Package (web deploy package).

If you want to separate these two, into two artifacts, you can use two Publish Artifact tasks as shown below, each one specifying exact path to publish (this path does not support wildcards, you just have to specify the folder you need to publish)

This will give you output as shown below.

In this example I just only used the Publish Artifacts task and created two artifacts using a single web site project. You can do same for your two project scenario. If you want to use wild card to filter more files before publish you can use "Copy File" task multiple times as required.