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In my last blog post, I wrote about how we can set up continuous deployment to an Azure Web App, for an ASP.NET application that was using Gulp to generate client side resources. I have also previously written about how to do it using GitHub and Kudu (here and here). However, just creating the client side resources and uploading the to a Web App is really not the best use of Azure. It would be much better to offload those requests to blob storage, instead of having the webserver having to handle them. For several reasons…

So let’s see how we can modify the deployment from the previous post to also include uploading the created resources to blob storage as part of the build.

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I recently wrote a couple of blog posts (first post, second post) about setting up CD of an ASP.NET web app with Gulp from GitHub to an Azure Web App. However, what if we aren’t using GitHub? What if we are using Visual Studio Tem Service (former Visual Studio Online)? Well, in that case, it is a whole different ballgame. There is actually not too much that is the same at all…

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In  my last post, I wrote about how to run Gulp as part of your deployment process when doing continuous deployment from GitHub to an Azure Web App using Kudu. As part of that post, I used Gulp to generate bundled and minified JavaScript and CSS files that was to be served to the client.

The files were generated by using Gulp, and included in the deployment under a directory called dist. However, they were still part of the website. So they are still taking up resources from the webserver as they need to be served from it. And also, they are taking up precious connections from the browser to the server… By offloading them to Azure Blob Storage, we can decrease the amount of requests the webserver gets, and increase the number of connections used by the browser to retrieve resources. And it isn’t that hard to do…

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I just spent some time trying to figure out how to set up continuous deployment to an Azure Web App from GitHub, including running Gulp as part of the build. It seems that there are a lot blog posts and instructions on how to set up continuous deployment, but none of them seem to take into account that people actually use things like Gulp to generate client side resources during the build

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A while back, I was contacted by the people at Webucator in regards to one of my blog posts. In particular this one… They wanted to know if they could make a video version of it, and of course I said yes! And here it is! Hot off the presses!

So there it is! And they even managed to get my last name more or less correct, which is awesome! So if you are looking for some on-line ASP.NET Training, have a look at their website.

I recently did a blog post about how to get an ASP.NET 5 application to run in a Windows Server container using Docker. However, I kept thinking about that solution, and started wondering if I could add IIS Application Request Routing to the mix as well. What if I could have containers at different ports, and have IIS and ARR routing incoming requests to different ports based on the host for example. And apparently I could. So I decided to write another post about how I got it going.

Disclaimer: There is still some kinks to work out regarding the routing. Right now, I have to manually change the routing to point to the correct container IP every time it is started, as I don’t seem to find a way to assign my containers static IP addresses…

Disclaimer 2: I have no clue about how this is supposed to be done, but this seems to work…

A couple of days ago, I ended up watching a video about Windows Server 2016 at Microsoft Virtual Academy. I think it was A Deep Dive into Nano Server, but I’m not sure to be honest. Anyhow, they started talking about Windows Server Containers and Docker, and I got very interested.

I really like the idea of Docker, but since I’m a .NET dev, the whole Linux dependency is a bit of a turn-off to be honest. And yes, I know that ASP.NET 5 will be cross-platform and so on, but in the initial release of .NET Core, it will be very limited. So it makes it a little less appealing. However, with Windows Server Containers, I get the same thing, but on Windows. So all of the sudden, it got interesting to look at Docker. So I decided to get an ASP.NET 5 app up and running in a Windows Server Container. Actually, I decided to do it in 2 ways, but in this post I will cover the simplest way, and then I will do another post about the other way, which is more complicated but has some benefits…

This post was supposed to be an introduction to Azure WebJobs, but it took a weird turn somewhere and became a guide to building a simple PicPaste replacement using just a wimple Azure Web App and a WebJob.

As such, it might not be a really useful app, but it does show how simple it is to build quite powerful things using Azure.

So, what is the goal? Well, the goal is to build a website that you can upload images to, and then get a simple Url to use when sharing the image. This is not complicated, but as I want to resize the image, and add a little overlay to it as well before giving the user the Url, I might run into performance issues if it becomes popular. So, instead I want the web app to upload the image to blob storage, and then have a WebJob process it in the background. Doing it like this, I can limit the number of images that are processed at the time, and use a queue to handle any peaks.

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A while back, at NDC Oslo, I was approached by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell regarding joining them for an episode of their podcast DotNetRocks. Obviously I said yes without hesitating! Who wouldn’t!? Unfortunately there were some scheduling problems, so we couldn’t do it during NDC. So instead, we did it over Skype a week or so later. And it has now finally been published on the DotNetRocks website.

The topic for the episode is the SOLID principles, which I have been talking about at quite a few conferences now. It was nice talking about these principles under these relaxed circumstances, without getting some of the flaming that I get ever so often for being a bit too pragmatic about the whole thing. Hopefully people will enjoy listening to it, and get some thoughts and ideas about how to work with SOLID in there projects. So go ahead and have a listen at http://bit.ly/dotnetrockssolid.

A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how to set up a “front-end build pipeline” using Gulp. The pipeline handled things like less to css conversion, bundling and minification, TypeScript to JavaScript transpile etc. However, this pipeline built on the idea that you would have Gulp watching your files as you worked, and doing the work as they changed. The problem with this is that it only runs on the development machine, and not the buildserver.… I nicely avoided this topic by ending my second post with “But that is a topic for the next post”. I guess it is time for that next post…

So let’s start by looking at the application I will be using for this example!

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