What is azure-pipelines-tasks?

Azure Pipelines is Microsoft's service for automating software builds, tests, and deployments. When a developer pushes code, Azure Pipelines can automatically run a series of steps, such as compiling the code, running tests, and publishing the result. Each individual step in that process is called a task. This repository contains the source code for all the built-in tasks that come included with Azure Pipelines and Team Foundation Server, which is the on-premise version of the same system. Examples of tasks include running a script, building a .NET project, running tests with a specific test runner, or deploying to a cloud service. The repository is published openly by Microsoft both as a reference and as a way for the community to report bugs and suggest improvements. For most situations where you need something custom in your pipeline, Microsoft recommends using the existing script-running tasks, such as the PowerShell or Bash tasks, rather than writing a new one. But if you need something that integrates more deeply, like reading build credentials or writing structured progress records back to the Azure Pipelines interface, you can write your own task. The repository serves as a working example of how that is done. Custom tasks you write can be uploaded to Azure Pipelines using a command-line tool Microsoft provides, or packaged into an Azure DevOps extension and shared through Microsoft's marketplace. The repository accepts contributions and bug reports, and security issues should be sent to Microsoft's security team by email rather than filed publicly.