Enterprise CI/CD Pipeline Modernization

Enterprise-wide CI/CD modernization for an 80+ repository .NET, .NET Core, and Vue.js product line, taking release engineering from fully manual, laptop-driven deployments to a governed, pipeline-first delivery model built entirely in Azure DevOps.

As the engineer who owned this initiative end-to-end, I designed and built the CI/CD pipelines, YAML templates, branch policies, and release tooling used to build, test, and deploy every repository, plus a dedicated Product Library and production deployment pipeline that replaced the legacy Windows desktop installer.

• Deployments across .NET, .NET Core, and Vue.js apps were entirely manual: developers built on their own laptops and copied binaries directly onto Dev/QA IIS servers, resulting in slow, inconsistent releases and heavy engineering overhead.

• No branching strategy compatible with pipeline automation existed. The team worked off loosely maintained main/dev branches with no standard for how changes or hotfixes flowed, despite having to support several product versions in parallel.

• Production installs and upgrades relied on a Windows desktop setup application. The installer itself was fragile to maintain and regularly caused problems on both fresh installs and in-place upgrades.

1. Reverse-engineered the build process for each of the 80+ repositories individually, building locally and deploying to IIS on my own machine to learn each repo's build steps and configuration touchpoints (web.config, appsettings.json, etc.).

2. Validated the approach in Azure DevOps first, building a handful of repos in CI to work out platform-specific issues before scaling further.

3. Designed reusable YAML pipeline templates for build, test, and publish, including NuGet publishing to Azure Artifacts for shared libraries, then rolled out CI pipelines repo by repo.

4. Built CD pipelines using what I'd learned from the manual deployments, writing supporting PowerShell tools for repos that needed configuration transforms applied at deploy time.

5. Deployed each repo through Dev, QA, and QA Automation stages on Windows Server (IIS) hosted on Azure VMs and on-premises servers, with automated tests wired into each release plus scheduled nightly full-suite runs.

6. Designed a dedicated repository structure for SQL scripts, with tooling to execute them against the right target server as part of the pipeline.

7. Partnered with the Principal Architect and the team to define a trunk-based branching strategy for Azure Repos, then implemented and configured the branch policies myself.

8. Built the path from stable build to production: added two extra CD stages to publish release-candidate and production-ready versions into a Product Library backed by Azure Storage, with a defined folder and versioning structure, plus the PowerShell tooling to publish into it.

9. Designed a standalone production deployment pipeline that takes target details (URL, database credentials, server names, etc.) as input, pulls the matching binaries and scripts from the Product Library, and performs the full install or upgrade, including IIS configuration changes and running the relevant database scripts.

10. Beyond full-product deployment, designed module-based patch pipelines for updating a single module in an already-deployed instance to a newer version, deploying only that module's relevant binaries, services, and scripts without touching the rest of the product.