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reviewing those posts recently at customers I’ve been working with, I’ve realized that these posts are a little outdated, you need pieces of both to form a full picture and the scripts that I wrote for those posts are now encapsulated in Tasks in my marketplace extension. So in this post I’m going to do a complete end-to-end walkthrough of deploying web applications using Team Build and Release Management. I’ll be including handling configs – arguably the hardest part of the whole process.

Release Management (RM) is awesome – mostly because it works off the amazing cross platform build engine. Also, now that pricing is announced, we know that it won’t cost an arm and a leg!

Yes, I’ve been playing with Docker again – no big surprise there. This time I decided to take a look at scaling an application that’s in a Docker container. Scaling and load balancing are concepts you have to get your head around in a microservices architecture!

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.

There are several different types of test – unit tests, functional test, load tests and so on. Generally, unit tests are the easiest to implement and have a high return on investment. Conversely, UI automation tests tend to be incredibly fragile, hard to maintain and don’t always deliver a huge amount of value. However, if you carefully design a good UI automation framework (especially for web testing) you can get some good mileage.

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 run test – a precursor to running the agent in a container as the de-facto method of running agents!

I unashamedly love Docker. Late last year I posted some thoughts I had on Docker DevOps. In this post I’m going to take a look at Docker DevOps using DotNet Core 1.0.0, Docker Tools for Visual Studio, Docker for Windows and VSTS.

You need to get onto the new Release Management (the web-based one) in VSTS or TFS 2015 Update 2. The new version is far superior to the old version for numerous reasons – it uses the new Team Build cross-platform agent, has a much simpler UI for designing releases, has better logging etc. etc.

Azure’s Service Fabric is breathtaking – the platform allows you to create truly “born in the cloud” apps that can really scale. The platform takes care of the plumbing for you so that you can concentrate on business value in your apps. If you’re looking to create cloud apps, then make sure you take some time to investigate Service Fabric.

Ever since Application Insights (AppInsights) was released, I’ve loved it. Getting tons of analytics about site usage, performance and diagnostics – pretty much for free – makes adding Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to you application a no-brainer. If you aren’t using AppInsights, then you really should be.