Questions for you, @neuecc:

1. Why do you build debug configuration for PR/CI? Most everyone builds release for that, which is useful because we ship the release config so building it more regularly can help catch release-only flaws.
2. Why do you not build nuget packages on PR/CI? That similarly delays finding a whole class of bugs that otherwise a pull request could find and block on.

I can dramatically simplify your release workflows. You have a ton of code to update package.json and yet nbgv can do it automatically for you.

I'm hesitant to rewrite your release workflows, though I think they could be dramatically simpler, because I gather you're reusing these workflows across repos at your company/team, and you may not like having one repo that does things differently.

But I recommend you apply some changes:

1. Stop taking the tag name from the user at workflow dispatch and leverage NB.GV to determine what it should be. You can use nbgv tag to create a tag on any commit. It will figure out the version number. You can also use nbgv get-version -v NuGetPackageVersion to determine what the nuget package version will be.
2. You can set the package.json version with npm version ${VERSION} --no-git-tag-version --allow-same-version, where you get the ${VERSION} from nbgv get-version -v NpmPackageVersion.

@AArnott

1. Yes, I agree that using the release build would be best. Let's do that.

2. I had been skipping it since package versioning is tied to releases. If it can be automated with NB.GV, that would be good. However, I don't see much value in building NuGet packages themselves (while we could upload them to GitHub packages, I haven't seen many cases where they're effectively utilized due to credentials issues. In this regard, I think Azure Pipelines is superior - I've also used Azure Pipelines when distributing internal packages).

I think your suggestion is good, so I'd like to consider it.

Could you write about the release flow using NB.GV in CONTRIBUTING.md?
Including information about when we need to modify version.json.
Also, I'd appreciate if you could delete all Azure Pipelines-related items, including directories and files.

Regarding nuget package build, if you see no value in pushing CI packages to a feed, that's fine. But I strongly encourage building those packages on every build anyway, even if they aren't pushed anywhere, because package build authoring is tricky and can easily break the build if PR builds don't validate them.

I'll make the changes you suggest and enable package build (but not push) on PR/CI.

The release flow using NB.GV doesn't much apply, in fact NB.GV itself doesn't much apply, with your workflows written the way they are, which overrides the version information at the time you queue the release build. So if you'd like to consider how I do releases on Github Actions with NB.GV, I think that should be a separate PR.

While I'd like to actively consider proper utilization of NB.GV, there's also a possibility that we might completely remove it.

Ya, I suspected that might be the direction you're going, which is why I haven't spent time bringing it back to the release pipeline yet. Let me know if you want help bringing it back, but I'm content to let you drive either direction.

I think it would be better to refrain from repeatedly promoting it in other repositories, as that kind of behavior could be seen as trolling.

Thanks for letting me know how you feel about it. I'll refrain from it.