Troubleshooting MSBuild Assembly Issues When Migrating Azure DevOps Pipelines from Windows-2019 to Windows-2022

A team encountered a failure in our Azure DevOps build pipeline when using the Microsoft-hosted agent windows-2019. The pipeline suddenly started failing with errors indicating that the configuration was no longer supported. This happens because Microsoft has deprecated the windows-2019 hosted agents, making them unavailable for new builds. 

Resolve Azure DevOps Build Pipeline Warning, "The windows-2019 runner image is being deprecated, consider switching to windows-2022 (windows-latest) or windows-2025 instead"

The Windows-2019 runner image in Azure DevOps is being deprecated, and pipelines using the Windows-2019 hosted agent display a warning recommending a switch to a newer hosted agent. However, after changing the agent, build pipelines may break due to dependency and environment differences. This blog explains a NuGet restore failure that occurred after switching to Windows-2022 and provides a solution for it.

Warning: The windows-2019 runner image is being deprecated, consider switching to windows-2022 (windows-latest) or windows-2025 instead

Using NuGet Packages as Azure DevOps Artifacts

When we work with Azure DevOps deployment pipelines, we have several options to select the build artifacts. Most common way is selecting the build artifacts published in the build pipeline. Other than this we can publish the artifacts as NuGet packages and save in the Azure DevOps Artifacts feeds. This post will explain how to create a NuGet feed, build and push NuGet packages using an Azure DevOps build pipeline to the feed. Finally, we will discuss how to deploy artifacts packaged as the NuGet packages using Azure DevOps deployment pipelines.