Azure Pipelines - Microsoft-hosted agent - windows latest vs windows-latest

Question

In Azure DevOps Release Pipeline for a Agent Job I can choose either windows latest or windows-latest as Agent Specification for Agent pool Azure Pipelines. I have not seen this anywhere else and the documentation does not mention it either. Given that documentation mentions windows-latest I will use that.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml

Is this a legacy name that will be removed or where does it come from? I have not noticed this before.

Answer 1

Tested two releases with the different agents, both seem to target windows-latest according to documentation.

https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/blob/win22/20220522.1/images/win/Windows2022-Readme.md

https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/releases/tag/win22%2F20220522.1

windows latest:

windows-latest: