Continuous integration and deployment of desktop applications with GitHub Actions

From conversations with desktop developers, we learned that many people want to learn how to quickly configure continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI / CD) workflows for WPF and Windows Forms to take advantage of the many benefits of CI / CD pipelines, such as:

• Detection of bugs at the beginning of the development cycle
• Improving the quality and reliability of software
• Ensuring consistent build quality
• Fast and secure deployment of new features
• Quickly troubleshoot production issues with new deployments

Therefore, we created a sample application (GitHub)  to demonstrate the capabilities of DevOps in your applications using the recently released  GitHub Actions .



With GitHub Actions, you can quickly and easily automate your software workflows with CI / CD.

• Integrate code changes directly on GitHub to speed development cycles
• Teach assemblies to quickly find gaps and create testable debug builds
• Run tests continuously to identify and fix errors
• Automatically collect, sign, package and deploy branches that pass CI

The sample application demonstrates how to create YAML files that make up the DevOps workflow on GitHub. In the walkthrough you will learn:

• How to create YAML files to use multiple channels so that you can create different versions of the application for testing, deployment with additional downloads and the Microsoft Store.
• Best practices for securely storing passwords and other secrets on GitHub, guaranteeing the protection of your valuable assets.
• How to enable Publish Profiles in WPF and Windows Forms, files that store information about your publishing goals, such as deployment location, target structure, and target runtime. Publish Profiles is inspired  by the Windows Application Packaging project  and simplifies the assembly and packaging steps of your DevOps pipeline, simplifying the development process.

Read our  walkthrough . And if you have any questions or feedback,  we’ll be happy to chat on GitHub .