Andrew Hoefling

More and more build scenarios using Azure Pipelines require complex customization which have been simplified by the Configuration As Code feature that has been available in Azure DevOps for a couple years now. When making the switch from the GUI to YAML I sturggled quite a bit with build numbers not working the same exact way since you can't customize the Version Number.

Deploying a .NET Framework WebJob to Azure is easy enough, but as of writing this blog the tooling is lacking for .NET Core. Many organizations are making it an initiative to migrate their .NET Framework projects to .NET Core which is a good idea. The tooling limitation for .NET Core WebJobs should not be a barrier, following this guide you will be able to deploy your .NET Core WebJobs to Azure

Installing Microsoft SQL Server on Windows Server Core for any of your enviornments should not be a daunting task, even for a developer that doesn't have an IT Team. Let's go through the simple steps you need to follow to get the installer on the server installing it. Once installed we can make sure we have our Azure Firewall configured correctly if it is a development server.

Using Windows Server Core has some big advantages and to our business the advantage is performance since there is no desktop experience. This makes configuring anything you do more complicated if you are not familiar with the equivelent commands in PowerShell. As you would expect there is no way to use the IIS Wizard for completing a Certificate Request and installing the correct certificates needed to server SSL traffic. With a few commands you will have your traffic ready to be served over SSL with Cloudflare.

A how-to guide by a Developer for IIS and ASP.NET Core on Windows Server Core

Increasing performance on your Windows Server may be as easy as getting rid of the desktop enviornment, now your server is focusing more on running your apps instead of the desktop enviornment. 

VSTS and Azure go so well together, any project is just a few key strokes away from deploying source code out to the cloud. Sometimes we don't have the luxury of working in Azure and we need to use VSTS to securely deploy code out to any server. WIth the ease of built in scripts to VSTS and powershell access you can start deploying to IIS just as easy as Azure.

DNN (DotNetNuke) is a Dot Net based Content Management System (CMS). Building DNN Modules allows you to easily extend the functionality of the DNN Website with complex apps that you can bolt on to any page in your CMS.

The Release build in VSTS is a powerful tool and once customized correctly can eliminate the need for simple transform files being included in source control. After reading this article you should have an understanding of how to update a web.config for different VSTS Release Build Enviornments.

Automating builds with VSTS saves the teams countless hours of debugging when someone gives the code the “works on my machine” seal of approval. The tests may not run, there will be stale code between developers and it just causes problems.

Managing project dependencies can be complicated, from handling shared libraries, 3rd party libraries, homebrew libaries and forks of open source libraries. There is a need for just about every project regardless of size to manage these libraries with a Package Manager. Fortunately most 3rd Party Libraries are on NuGet or some other public Package Management feed so we don’t have to manage them. Getting your private packages on your own private NuGet server is now easier then ever and with the tools built into VSTS you can create automated builds that deploy changes to your libraries to that package management server.