Yesterday I created a build and push artifact CI/CD pipeline for AZ-400 practise in Azure DevOps!

This weekend I spent some time improving my small .NET helper library CI/CD pipeline as part of my AZ-400 study path. The goal wasn't just to pass the exam, but to build something I can reuse and point to in real projects.

What I set up:

• A small .NET extension-library.
• AI assisted unit test generation with Aider and Qwen2.5
• An Azure DevOps YAML pipeline that builds from a GitHub repo.
• Automated NuGet packaging and publishing to GitHub Packages using a GitHub PAT.
• NuGet restore caching to speed up builds.
• Static check style gate with dotnet format --verify-no-changes.
• Code coverage
• Automatic versioning using $(Build.BuildId) so every CI run produces a unique SemVer-compatible package.

A few small but meaningful lessons:

• Adding paths.exclude: - 'azure-pipelines.yml' to the trigger prevented the pipeline from running on every YAML edit and gave me intentional control over when to run it.
• Aider helped scaffold most unit tests, but I ended up tweaking and fixing them manually, proving that AI-assisted development is best when paired with human review. The pipeline now reports ~63% line coverage, which is enough to show the tooling works: the point is the pipeline, not the number.
• I also hit a caching quirk: the Cache@2 post-job task kept failing because the target cache directory did not exist on first runs. A quick mkdir -p ~/.nuget/packages before the cache task fixed it and left the pipeline green.

Next steps:

• Recreate the pipeline in GitHub Actions
• Add SonarQube