Last week I posted an end-to-end walkthrough about how to build and deploy web apps using Team Build and Release Management – including config management. The post certainly helps you if you’re on the .NET 4.x Framework – but what about deploying .NET Core apps? The Build Once Principle If you’ve ever read any of my blogs you’ll know I’m a proponent of the “build once” principle. That is, your ...

I’ve posted previously about deploying web applications using Team Build and Release Management (see Config Per Environment vs Tokenization in Release Management and WebDeploy, Configs and Web Release Management). However, reviewing those posts recently at customers I’ve been working with, I’ve realized that these posts are a little outdated, you need pieces of both to form a full picture and the ...

Most development requires working against some kind of database. Some teams choose to use Object Relational Mappers (ORMs) like Entity Framework. I think that should be the preferred method of dealing with databases (especially code-first), but there are times when you just have to work with a database schema. Recently I had to demo ReadyRoll in VSTS. I have to be honest that I don’t like the ...

This week I finally got around to updating my VSTS extension (which bundle x-plat VersionAssembly and ReplaceTokens tasks) to use the new vsts-task-lib, which is used by the new DotNet Core vsts-agent. One of the bonuses of the new agent is that it can run in a DotNet Core Docker container! Since I am running Docker for Windows, I can now (relatively) easily spin up a test agent in a container to ...