Update a legacy pipeline in Azure Pipelines

An Azure Pipelines pipeline explicitly specifies the versions of Visual Studio tools such as MSBuild and VS Test. To continue supporting newer versions of these products, new virtual machines will be deployed with newer versions of Visual Studio pre-installed. Any existing pipelines need to be manually updated to use the newer version.

Determine if your pipeline needs to be updated

Build and development virtual machines deployed with version 10.0.13 through version 10.0.20 include Visual Studio 2017. Those deployed with version 10.0.21 and later include Visual Studio 2019. Support for Visual Studio 2015 was deprecated in April 2021 and support for Visual Studio 2017 was deprecated in April 2022. If your build virtual machine does not include Visual Studio 2019 you must plan to deploy a new build virtual machine with version 10.0.21 or later, or consider using the new hosted build pipeline.

If your build virtual machine has Visual Studio 2019 installed, you can use the newer versions of MSBuild and VS Test. If your pipeline was created by a virtual machine deployment prior to version 10.0.21, you will have to manually update the pipeline.

Finally, you can check your build pipeline on the Build the solution step. The MSBuild Version property indicates the version of Visual Studio in use.

Updating the Azure Pipelines pipeline

The following four properties, in three tasks in the pipeline, need to be updated.