Real-World DevOps on the MAUI Team - Episode 144

On today's episode of the podcast, Jeffrey Palermo is joined by two special guests, Alex Blount and Sweekriti Satpathy.

Alex is a Principal Software Engineer Manager on the Customer Engagement Team for the Microsoft Developer Edition, and Sweekriti is a Senior Software Engineer on the same team.

In their conversation, Alex and Sweekriti discuss real-world DevOps on the MAUI team, how to get up and running with MAUI, a rundown of the products that the team uses (and how they're configured), and much more.

Topics of Discussion:

[:14] About The Azure DevOps Podcast, Clear Measure, the new podcast Architect Tips, and Jeffrey's offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:26] About today's episode.

[1:46] Jeffrey welcomes Sweekriti Satpathy and Alex Blount to the podcast.

[1:54] Alex shares about his career journey and current role with Microsoft.

[3:48] Sweekriti shares about her career journey and current role within Microsoft.

[5:16] About Sweekriti's Learn TV show, Hello World.

[5:42] Alex provides some backstory on what their team does.

[9:22] Sweekriti shares her insights on migrating to .NET MAUI.

[9:58] What do level three tests look like? Tests that have to take the user interface into account? What libraries and techniques are the teams using now to handle that?

[13:23] Sweekriti's insights around UI testing from a DevOps pipeline point of view.

[18:14] Is this UI test library that Sweekiri spoke about a NuGet library? And what layer does it operate at? Is it on top of the emulator or does it not even need to spin up an emulator?

[19:23] Alex highlights a common pitfall they often see customers fall into with regards to testing, and how to address it.

[21:28] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[21:59] A lot of developers use the technique of taking a screenshot for every action in the user interface (in Azure Pipelines, testing in Selenium, etc.) Is this natively built into App Center?

[23:44] For the release candidate of a MAUI app, what format does it take? And where's the right place to archive those?

[28:05] Sweekriti shares an important aspect of how these tasks work.

[29:20] Are there any pipeline configurations that are in repositories that can be looked at today? Sweekriti offers some advice on how to get your environment up and running with MAUI.

[32:05] Alex shares his insights on telemetry.

[34:24] Sweekriti's insights on telemetry.

[35:00] As far as product strategy, is Microsoft aligning App Service for mobile telemetry and application insights to serverside telemetry?

[26:45] Skeekriti shares her excitements around .NET MAUI and everything becoming more streamlined.

[37:16] Is anyone writing an early release book on .NET MAUI development?

[37:59] Where to find resources related to .NET MAUI.

[40:22] Jeffrey thanks Sweekriti and Alex for joining the podcast and sharing their insights.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Architect Tips — New video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!