Error Deploying Release Pipeline Windows 2016 deprecated - Azure Devops

Question

I got this error message:

This is a scheduled windows-2016 brownout. The windows-2016 environment is deprecated and will be removed on April 1st, 2022. For more details, see https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/5238

Took me forever to figure out it was and I hope this helps anyone facing same issue:

The release pipeline agent needs changing from 2016 to 2019 or whatever you build on as long as its > 2016

Answer 1

The release pipeline agent needs changing from 2016 to 2019 or whatever you build on as long as its > 2016

Answer 2

What I figured out is that, at some point, any agent that's using the 2016 configuration could be in Azure Pipeline or Azure Release. So what I did was the following:

1. Checked in my project config (web.config/appsettings) if I was referring to it somehow.

2. Checked my pipeline configuration (azure-pipelines.yml). It was one of the issues. So instead of having:

   pool:
     vmImage: 'windows-latest'
   

   It was changed for the following

   pool:
     vmImage: 'windows-2019'
   

   Note: Since the project was using .NET Framework MVC 5, it was pointing to v4.5.1, so it was changed to 4.8 first. Before I changed to 4.8, this was the error that I got:

   

3. After getting the message above, the only thing that wasn't considered was the release configuration, so that was it! Go to Releases > Edit > Run on Agent. In here, the Agent Specification label was pointing to vs2017-win2016. So I changed it to windows-2019 and it did the trick!

Also this post helped. In case you're using some soon-to-be-deprecated Windows Hosted config: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/5403