Set up CI with Azure Pipelines

[azure-pipelines]

See https://dev.azure.com/TypeStrong/ts-loader

[kaylangan]

Hi! I'm a Program Manager on Azure Pipelines.

You set up your matrix like this:

strategy:
  matrix:
    node_8_x_typescript_2_9_2:
      node_version: 8.x
      typescript_version: typescript@2.9.2
...

[johnnyreilly]

Thanks for responding @kaylangan !

[johnnyreilly]

So does this mean I need to list out every permutation I require manually? There's no way to do what AppVeyor / Travis do whereby they come up with all the permutations given the variables you want to test?

Obviously it's possible to specify each permutation. But when you've multiple variables that gets noisy quickly!

[kaylangan]

For now, you'll need to manually expand the matrix. We found that almost all projects that use a multi-dimensional matrix ended up having exclusions for some of the permutations, and rather than introduce an exclusion concept we went with explicit configuration.

All that said, we're adding an each expression that--while intended for pre/post-steps in templates--could be twisted to generate a matrix: microsoft/azure-pipelines-yaml#2. We're still discussing that.

[johnnyreilly]

Thanks @kaylangan - that's great to hear! I may hold off until each is available.

I really appreciate you getting back to me by the way, thanks so much!

[johnnyreilly]

It looks like each isn't going to do what we want. Hopefully this may lead to something though: microsoft/azure-pipelines-yaml#20

[johnnyreilly]

Closing in favour of @g-plane's GitHub Actions approach. I've disabled the AppVeyor webhook as well as AppVeyor has become unstable in the last month.