Continuous Integration for UWP projects - Making Builds Faster

Are you developing a UWP app? Are you doing continuous integration? Do you want to improve your CI build times while still generating the .appxupload required for store submission? If so, read-on.

Prerequisites

You'll need VS 2015 with the UWP 1.1 tools installed. The UWP 1.1 tooling has some important fixes for creating app bundles and app upload files for command line/CI builds.

You'll also need to register your app on the Windows Dev Center and associate it with your app. Follow the docs for setting linking your project to a store from within VS first.

If you're using VSO, you may need to setup your own VM to run a vNext build agent. I'm not sure VSO's hosted agents have all the latest tools as of today. I run my builds in an A2 VM on Azure; it's not the fastest build server but it's good enough.

Building on a Server

Now that you have a solution with one or more projects that create an appx (UWP) app, you can start setting up your build scripts. One problem you'll need to solve is updating your .appxmanifest with an incrementing version each time. I've solved this using the fantastic GitVersion tool. There's a number of different ways to use it, but on VSO it sets environment variables as part of a build step that I use to update the manifest on build.

I use a .proj msbuild file with a set of targets the CI server calls, but you can use your favorite build scripting tool.

My code looks like this:

<Target Name="UpdateVersion"> <PropertyGroup> <Version>$(GITVERSION_MAJOR).$(GITVERSION_MINOR).$(GITVERSION_BUILDMETADATA)</Version> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Include="$(SolutionDir)\**\*.appxmanifest"> <Find><![CDATA[ Version="\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+"]]></Find> <ReplaceWith><![CDATA[ Version="$(Version).0"]]></ReplaceWith> </RegexTransform> </ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Items="@(RegexTransform)" /> <Message Text="Assm: Ver $(Version)" /> </Target>

The idea is to call GitVersion , either by calling GitVersion.exe earlier in the build process, or by using the GitVersion VSO Build Task in a step prior to the build step.

GitVersion can also update your AssemblyInfo files too, if you'd like.

Finally, at the end of the build step, you'll want to collect certain files for the output. In this case, it's the .appxupload for the store. In VSO, I look for the contents in my app dir, MyApp\AppPackages\**\*.appxupload .

If you setup your build definition to build in Release mode, you should have a successful build with a .appxupload artifact available you can submit to the store. Remember, we've already associated this app with the store, and we've enabled building x86 , x64 , and arm as part of our initial run-through in Visual Studio.

The problem

For your safety, a CI build will by default only generate the .appxupload file if you're in Release mode with .NET Native enabled. This is to help you catch compile-time errors that would delay your store submission.

That's well-intentioned, but it can severely slow down your builds. On one project I'm working on, on that A2 VM, a "normal" debug build takes about 14 min while a Release build takes 81 minutes! That's too long for CI.

Fortunately, there's a few things we can do to speed things up if you're willing to live a bit dangerously.

Force MSBuild to create the .appxupload without actually - yes, it is possible! In your build definition, pass the additional arguments to MSBuild: /p:UseDotNetNativeToolchain=false /p:BuildAppxUploadPackageForUap=true . This overrides two variables that control the use of .NET Native and packaging. If you have any UWP Unit Test projects, you can disable package generation for them if you're not running those unit tests on the CI box. There is a g̶o̶o̶d̶ reason for this — it's hard. Running UWP CI tests requires your test agent to be running as an interactive process, not a service. You need to configure your build box to auto-login on reboot and then startup the agent. In your test projects, add the following <PropertyGroup> to your csproj file:

<!-- Don't build an appx for this in TFS/command line msbuild --> <PropertyGroup> <GenerateAppxPackageOnBuild Condition="'$(GenerateAppxPackageOnBuild)' == '' and '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' != 'true'">false</GenerateAppxPackageOnBuild> </PropertyGroup>

This works because the .appxupload doesn't actually contain native code. It contains three app bundles (one per platform) with MSIL, that the store compiles to native code in the cloud. The local .NET Native step is only a "safety" check, as is running WACK. If you regularly test your code in Release mode locally, and have run WACK to ensure your code is ok, then there's no need to run either on every build.

After making those two adjustments, I'm able to generate the .appxupload files on every build and the build takes the same 13 min as debug mode.