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Comment by withinrafael | Hacker News Reader

Windows Development MVP here.

I feel like I must shoulder some of the responsibility here for not being louder about these issues. But must say, I'm disappointed to hear you're "surprised" about the UX issues. I've been telling your folks the UX is dreadful (e.g. as far back as pre-launch) and kept hearing back "we know, we're fixing it". I'll start formalizing the feedback and push it through the pipes, stay tuned. I'm also local (Bellevue), would love to come in and try to pipeline our relatively simple oss .net/wpf/uwp app. I suspect it'll be an eye opener for the both of us.

Some examples:

* You can't build a pipeline with a git repo. that contains submodules

* Found it impossible to edit the PATH for some custom tooling

* The New Pipeline experience just doesn't make a lot of sense, new users clicking around will eventually end up at the wrong Docs.

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Here's my experience with Microsoft.

I believe their feedback mechanisms are placebo, pacifiers for loud people. Microsoft pesters you to give feedback and works hard to ignore them. And then goes ahead with what they initially planned. At the end, they'll announce - "We had delivered what you wanted. Based on feedback..."

And then you start wondering if you're in the minority and other people are simply crazy until you see multiple complaints about the same things.

Their music app, Windows phone, Windows 10, Skype and Edge are where I experienced this. In all cases, user experience kept getting worse with each "IMPROVEMENT."

The only time Microsoft listens is when people ignore official feedback channels and there are massive outcries on many fronts. Even then, Microsoft often retreats only temporary.

I've never seen an answer on the weird social.microsoft site that had anything resembling a remotely usable technical response.

Also the responses you get on Azure support tickets is 10 worse than the ones from Amazon support.

Yes amazon support is pretty amazing. They’ve walked me through fixing a VPC I screwed up. No complaints here.

These large cut and paste answers with completely irrelevant instructions and a lot of begging for points. Totally useless and infuriating if you've spent a lot of time writing a good report.

Microsoft could further save money by building an answer bot.

It'll cost less, answer faster and wouldn't be any worse than the current outsourced indian community support staff.

Don't give them ideas...

I assumed that they already had, but that it wasn’t very good

Yes. Incidentally Connect used to be a placebo for us enterprise lot. This has been going on for a long time.

And I get told regularly by people who only use the Microsoft ecosystem that’s it is me who is the problem as well!? These people are just assuming the status quo is being punched in the dick all day.

And even worse when dealing with PlayReady. In the time i have been working with it, they have been switching between at least 4-5 different "Connect"-like portals for feedback and support. Each time dumping all the content from the previous that was no longer accessible.

I'm not in Redmond, but do send an email. I'm my HN name @microsoft.com. We should be able to sort out some of these issues for you. I'd like to hear more about the docs problem. But:

You should be able to recurse submodules in a pipeline. In the visual designer, select "Checkout Submodules" in the pipeline's get sources step. If you use YAML, set "submodules: true" or "submodules: recursive" in the checkout keyword.

You should also be able to specify environment variables (including PATH) with the env keyword. But do reach out and we can get to the bottom of this.

Hey, just one bit of feedback, I tried getting my github linked project to build late last year, but always failed to checkout sub modules.

The build log showed permission issues, and I did try workarounds suggested like changing the sub module URL and adding ssh keys as part of the checkout step, but in the end, my 8 hours allocated to “get vsts building” ended with this problem and I have not continued. The performance of builds was also poor.

It’s unfortunately burnt me enough that I’m just making an ec2 instance with teamcity.

It is likely that this is a variant of the issue with secure files. Secure files require a song and dance around changing the default branch or committing directly to a default branch to trigger a build after setup of the secure file. Coming from CI systems like Travis and Circle, this is an extremely confusing approach that I hope they consider changing.

Yes, we rolled out some improvements to how we authorize secure files (and other resources such as variable groups, agent pools, service connections) that you use in a YAML file. First, we introduced a toggle on each of these resources to mark them as "authorized in all pipelines". For new resources that you create, this will be on by default. Second, when you queue a build in the new YAML editor under Pipelines hub, then you get the option to correct the resource authorization issue. More work needs to be done here so that we can give you the right experience while maintaining the security of protected resources, and all of that is planned over the next month or two. Thanks.

That sounds like a great improvement to the process!

I'm sorry that the product wasn't easier to use, and that it wasted so much of your time. For anyone else running into this, we do have docs up about how to access authenticated submodules: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/repo... (that shows how to do it against another Azure Repos instance, but a variation will work for any Git provider with a PAT-style bearer token)

To your path issue... most of my own pipelines do an `npm run STEP` and I use JS scripts mostly... this covers me in window, linux and macos for the most part with Node. ymmv here though. That's just my $.02 and it's been relatively easier doing it that way.

I kind of wish $bash (git for window's bash version) was available as a shell option as that might make things easier as well.

Another issue is searching is painful... "TFS" vs "VSTS" vs "Azure DevOps" and half the time, the results are dated.

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