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