[RESOLVED] WIP: How to setup CI with Azure Pipelines for VB6 projects on github.com

Setting up Azure Pipelines Agent

Prerequisites:
- Azure Pipelines account for Azure DevOps
- and a (virtual) machine with licensed VB6 compiler (w/ SP6)
- and the Azure Pipelines Agent to perform the actual compilation.

First create an organization in Azure DevOps and notice its URL (e.g. https://dev.azure.com/myorg0976) then create an access token (PAT) to be used by the agent from [Profile Menu w/ Icon]->Personal access tokens (e.g. owz5wmpggd5ozloe4ekzcnjcdzrbozuprl54jlrcn6lmonhrwtk8 or similar) and write these down somewhere.

On the build machine from an elevated command prompt extract vsts-agent-win-x64-{version}.zip to c:\myagent or similar path without spaces and start config.cmd. You'll need to provide only two important options: 1. URL e.g. https://dev.azure.com/myorg0976 and 2. PAT token e.g. owz5wmpggd5ozloe4ekzcnjcdzrbozuprl54jlrcn6lmonhrwtk8. Leave everything else being default unless you want to setup the agent as a service, then you might want to provide for NT credentials for the service to execute under.

Start agent with run.cmd if not configured to run as a service.

Setting up github repository

Azure Pipelines now available in GitHub Marketplace
Build GitHub repositories

Authoring build.bat

Here is a sample build.bat batch file that starts VB6.exe to compile the actual .vbp project file. The most important part is that this keeps stderr clean and reports only fatal errors on stderr because this will be used with failOnStderr: true in pipelines config.

First it starts %Vb6% /make %%i /out %log_file% to compile the .vbp project with logged output to %log_file% then it scans for success with findstr /r /c:"Build of '.*' succeeded" %log_file% and if not found dumps %log_file% to stderr and exits with error=1 with this: || (type %log_file% 1>&2 & exit /b 1)

Authoring azure-pipelines.yml

Here is a sample azure-pipelines.yml configuration for a VB6 repository.

To be continued...

cheers,
</wqw>