[ci] Fix empty conditional block breaking internal pipeline YAML

[rmarinho]

Note

Are you waiting for the changes in this PR to be merged?
It would be very helpful if you could test the resulting artifacts from this PR and let us know in a comment if this change resolves your issue. Thank you!

Problem

The internal dotnet-maui official build currently fails to compile the pipeline YAML, before any stage runs:

/eng/pipelines/common/variables.yml (Line: 81, Col: 7): Expected at least one key-value pair in the mapping

Cause

#37589 removed - group: Publish-Build-Assets, but that group was the only child of the conditional that enclosed it, leaving an empty block behind:

    - group: AzureDevOps-Artifact-Feeds-Pats
    - ${{ if eq(variables['Build.DefinitionName'], 'dotnet-maui') }}:   # <- nothing under it

Azure DevOps requires a conditional insertion block to contain at least one entry, so template expansion fails outright.

Why PR validation stayed green

The empty block is nested inside an outer guard:

- ${{ if or(eq(variables['Build.DefinitionName'], 'dotnet-maui'), eq(variables['Build.DefinitionName'], 'dotnet-maui-build')) }}:
  - ${{ if notin(variables['Build.Reason'], 'PullRequest') }}:

For the public maui-pr definition that outer condition is false, so Azure DevOps short-circuits and never expands the inner block. The breakage is therefore invisible to PR CI and only manifests on the internal official build.

Fix

Remove the empty conditional. No file in the repository references the Publish-Build-Assets variable group any more, so it is deleted outright rather than repopulated.

Validation

• eng/pipelines/common/variables.yml parses as valid YAML.
• Swept all 39 YAML files under eng/pipelines/ for conditional blocks with no body — this was the only one.
• grep for Publish-Build-Assets across eng/ and .github/ returns no remaining references.

This blocks the internal build entirely, so it is worth merging ahead of larger infra work such as #36257 (which carries the same one-line fix, but cannot be validated on the internal pipeline until this is on main).

[github-actions]

🚀 Dogfood this PR with:

⚠️ WARNING: Do not do this without first carefully reviewing the code of this PR to satisfy yourself it is safe.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/maui/main/eng/scripts/get-maui-pr.sh | bash -s -- 37686

Or

• Run remotely in PowerShell:

iex "& { $(irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/maui/main/eng/scripts/get-maui-pr.ps1) } 37686"

[azure-pipelines]

Azure Pipelines:
Successfully started running 1 pipeline(s).
There may be pipelines that require an authorized user to comment /azp run to run.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR fixes a YAML template compilation failure in the internal dotnet-maui official Azure DevOps pipeline by removing an empty conditional insertion block in the shared variables template.

Changes:

• Removes an empty ${{ if ... }} conditional entry that had no children, which Azure DevOps rejects during template expansion.