Enhanced Mobile App Versioning in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Mobile Tasks

James Montemagno -

A little over a year ago, I introduced my Mobile App Tasks Extensions for iOS and Android into the Azure DevOps (VSTS) marketplace. For iOS and Android developers it made the tasks of versioning and adjusting package names a breeze. They were written completely in TypeScript with VS Code and of course are open source on GitHub. Since the initial release I have received overall positive feedback and a few feature requests to add new features. Over the last year I teamed up with my good friend Andrew Hoefling to add small features and optimizations, but finally this week we released version 1.0 with tons of great new features!

PList Transform

The first feature you will see is a brand new PList Transform Task. Andrew sent down this pull request and it is super slick. Basically just set any property name and value you want to set in your iOS plist file and you are good to go!

Unix Timestamp

When versioning apps I always had the assumption that developers wanted to manually configure version numbers. However, sometimes you want an auto incrementing number such as a timestamp. When versioning iOS and Android apps you now have the ability to select a custom version number or auto numbering with the Unix time in seconds. This matches App Center functionality, which is super cool :)

Misc Updates of Joy

Beyond that we fixed a few other items such as adding the iOS Bundle Identifier to the package name task, fixed issues when comments were in the Android Manifest, handled escaped paths, and updated to the latest packages.

Grab the Extension

You can grab the latest update of the Mobile App Tasks from the Visual Studio Marketplace right now!

Watch Me & Donovan

Last year my good friend Donovan Brown asked me to come on Visual Studio Toolbox to show off the awesome extension and talk Mobile DevOps. Check it out as I walk through the extensions:

How It Was Developed

If you want to see more on how it was developed be sure to check me out on Twitch where I live code. I recently did a full live stream where I added the unix timestamp feature to iOS and Android build tasks. You can watch the full video on YouTube right now!