What would I do with Azure Releases when I have a WPF application?

Question

Would there be a purpose of Azure Releases if I'm just building a WPF application?

In Azure Builds I can just use a Copy task to copy the output files to a drop location, right?

Answer 1

What would I do with Azure Releases when I have a WPF application?

Indeed, we could just use a Copy task to copy the output files to a drop location when we build/deploy the WPF application.

However, if we have to deploy the WPF application to multiple stages/machines, in this case, we may need add one more copy task to copy the output files. In addition, if the situation of each stages/machines is different, we may not be able to use only the copy task to complete the deployment. Now, we could use the Azure Release with multiple stages, like Dev, Test, Product and so on. one stage corresponds to an environment or machine, and each environment or machine can be set individually.

On the other hand, if we use a copy task to copy the output files to deploy the WPF application, WPF application will be deployed to the target machine every time when we enable CI. Obviously, not every modification we want to deploy to the target machine. So, we need a release pipeline to separate our build and deploy.

Hope this helps.