What I want to accomplish: I want to deploy an Azure Cloud Service via Release Management. I managed to get this working by following the steps outlined in this post. In the post the Azure publishsettings file is added to the project and used in Release Management to deploy the Azure package to a Cloud Service. So far so good.
What is the issue: The Azure publishsettings file will also contain information about the production environment. I don't want that information to be available to all the developers and therefor I would like to have a more secure alternative.
What did I try: I created a custom action which takes 3 arguments: subscription id, subscription name and certificate key. This way the Azure information stays in Release Management and can be passed to a script. This didn't work because the action is not shown in the Release Template Toolbox.
What is my question: What is the best way to pass Azure credentials to a deployment script via Release Management on a secure manner?