Posted by lee jones on Nov 16, 2016 in Asp.net, Azure, Cloud
If you deploy a single project asp.net core application to azure everything is about as smooth as it could be. A typical workflow would be to simply create a new web app, set the deployment source (e.g. your git repository) and everything is up and running in a few seconds. If, however, your solution contains multiple projects, how do you specify which project is deployed? Previously this would be done using Azure deployment scripts, but this is a needless effort for such a small task. Just look at the wiki for details on why you may want to avoid this. The preferred way is to specify an Application Setting in the Azure portal. The advantage of this is that you have no deployment code checked in to your source code repository and you can more easily toggle active projects both without deployment and between deployment slots. To do this we need to go to your web app in the portal, click App Settings and create a new App settings key called PROJECT with the path to your project file: However, while this works well with full .net framework applications that use .vbproj and .csproj solutions, at the time of writing asp.net core applications still use the soon-to-be-obsolete .xproj system. If you point your app setting to an xproj, you’ll get an error message in the console. A workaround to this is to update the setting to point to the directory of the solution you want to deploy, relative from the root of your source code repository. In .net core land, this is likely to be along the lines of [Solution name]\src\[project name]\ 1 [Solution name]\src\[project name]\ And you can verify this using the very, very handy console (found under development tools in your web app service list). Open the console and cd ..\repository 1 cd ..\repository and from there traverse your way to your folder containing your xproj. Copy that path (from repository onwards) and use this as the app setting: Redeploy your solution, and you should be up and running with your chosen project. Another benefit… Another nice benefit of this approach is that if you use deployment slots, you can toggle projects per deployment slots, making it exceedingly quick to switch projects just by doing a slot-swap in the...
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Posted by lee jones on May 27, 2016 in Asp.net, MVC
The more I play with asp.net core (RC2 at time of publication) the more I’m liking what I see. I still don’t see a use case for me on OSX or Linux yet, so the portability isn’t a massive thing for me. In my mind the windows use case for asp.net is fantastic and licence costs aside the setup and configuration is so simple on Windows I can see little benefit from venturing elsewhere. Application settings There are still things I don’t particularly like about core, including recent changes. One of these is accessing settings file. In ‘current’ asp.net (must be careful not to call it ‘old’ or ‘legacy’) is the ConfigurationManager class made accessing your settings from web.config both simple and succinct. Now though, web.config is no more. Why, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it’s the flexibility of having multiple configuration sources or not mixing application settings with its configuration. Regardless, you’ll now almost certainly be storing your configuration settings in a JSON file, with appsettings.json seemingly becoming the convention. In early releases of core this was similarly easy to access settings from a JSON file for example simply by using the IConfigurationRoot dictionary (provided you added the source in the startup configuration). However, in the latest builds (RC2 onwards) this has changed. You now need to strongly type your settings via POCO classes and access these settings through the IOptions class. Once its set up and configured the usage is quite straightforward but it’s a lot of setup and maintenance IMO. Every new setting requires adding to the JSON file AND to the corresponding POCO class. State of flux So at the time of writing asp.net core is at release candidate 2 stage. However, there are still some big, big changes going on. The underlying .net runtime has gone though a massive shift of late with the introduction of the much cleaner dotnet CLI. This is a big step forward IMO but not something you would normally expect in release candidates. This still feels much more beta than RC to me so be mindful that there are still lots of breaking changes going on. Another example of this is that having followed the recommended guidance on setting configuration settings access up the “new way” I was still hitting issues. Turns out that a namespace shuffle occurred in the core libraries and was largely undocumented until a couple of days ago (https://github.com/aspnet/Announcements/issues/180). Following the new namespace import and package restore and things are now working fine. As I say, core is still moving forward at a rapid pace with both minor and major changes causing breakage for the developer and at the same time invalidating lots of the already limited documentation. Sending email Another hurdle is the lack of System.Net.Mail in core. This means the tried and tested way of sending email is (at the time of writing)...
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I'm a gadget loving code-junkie who loves to program, create websites and try out new stuff. Married, with two young daughters I am also a keen marathon runner and fitness enthusiast.