How to build UWP apps with App Center
How to build your UWP app with App Center
Even if not put in evidence as Android or iOS apps, you can use App Center as an easier alternative to Azure DevOps Pipelines.
To have App Center configured to build your app all you have to do is to enter your account and click the Add new app button in upper right corner.
A new dialog will appear with some basic info to fill.
once done, click Add new app and the select Build on left menu
You will now be asked for the repository, where your project is hosted choosing from three alternatives: Azure DevOps, GitHub or BitBucket.
One selected the repository, you will see the list of available branches, select the one you want to build and click the little settings gear on right
A series of quite intuitive option will be prompted, worth nothing that you can provide an alternative signing certificate, like one generated by a trusted certificate authority, that will be used to sign the package. This will user experience installation much easier since the certificate doesn’t eventually need to be saved into certificate store like it happens when app is signed with a test certificate.
You can now click Save and trigger a build manually or on every push depending on your setting or Save and Build to trigger a build immediately.
Once the build is completed if you set Distribute builds to true
The people listed in the group you defined will receive an email with a link to the new build, the only thing they have to do is click it to have the app installed or updated.
If not, you can just use, the manual Distribute option.
Nothing really hard to understand, even without this post, thanks to the ease that distinguishes App Center.
There’s just one problem: If you build your UWP app in Debug mode, the build will probably fail with following error:
##[error]Publishing build artifacts failed with an error: Not found PathtoPublish: D:\a\1\a\Symbols
To solve it, manually edit the project file and add this line:
<AppxSymbolPackageEnabled>true</AppxSymbolPackageEnabled>Looks like that there’s an issue with apps with disabled debug symbols in App Center build pipeline at the moment.
Hope this will save you from the same headache i got spotting it with support service. :-)
