Loud & Abrasive

Unsurprisingly, App Services are one of Azure’s more useful and persistent offerings. Somewhat surprising (to me at least) is that WebJobs stand firmly beside them, after seeming like a tack-on, albeit a cool one. The way they are developed has evolved, however, now leveraging the same SDK that Azure Functions is built on. From a user’s perspective, WebJobs’ deploy-and-run-time is conversely unchanged. Unfortunately, that means deploying them is primarily advertised as a manual process from Visual Studio, the Azure Portal, or using Powershell. We know better, though, and can integrate WebJobs with our App Services in Azure DevOps Pipelines, even if we’re straying from the happy path.

I’ve become a big fan of Azure DevOps Pipelines. It’s a powerful and robust tool that enables really slick automated build and release processes. I wrote last about sexy auto-semversioning Nuget libraries using Build Pipelines. I’m still no expert in AzDO but am continuing to extend and improve the ways we leverage it. Recently I found a way to optimize against one of release pipelines’ biggest annoyances: app configuration for “non-transformable” config formats such as environment variables for Docker containers.

If you blinked last year (or hiked the Appalachian trail) you may have missed Microsoft’s big continuous integration service redesign and rebranding; from Visual Studio Team Services to Azure DevOps. I’ve had the surprising pleasure to work extensively on the platform since returning; migrating my client’s CI/CD operations over to build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps. So far, it has been a dream, especially compared to my past experiences with VSTS. Microsoft’s documentation on Azure DevOps is fantastic, and I’m not looking to reinvent any wheels. Instead, I’ll share a success we’ve had with managing internal Nuget packages.

It’s been a hot minute or three since I’ve emailed you. It would be easy to assume, as with previous updates, I’ve been to busy walking to get my thoughts together. At first I did not want to write this final post, but over time I realized it was unfair to leave my story without an end.