Passing release variables between two agent phases

Question

I\'m working with TFS on-premise. My issue is that during a release I have two agent phases separated by a manual intervention.

In the first agent phase, I set a var

Answer 1

I've used the "Variable dehydration task" to write the value to my artifact folder in a build pipeline. I then read the json with inline-powershell. Currently, I'm reading it on every task in my release pipeline, which seems mental to me, but it sort of works. You ought to be able to set a global or env? variable and use that instead. Supposedly fixed in 2017, but I'm using 2015.