Creating Octopus Deploy packages with Visual Studio and Teamcity

In my previous post I’ve talked about creating new projects in Octopus Deploy in order to deploy projects to different environments. In this post I’ll explain a bit on how to create Octopus Deploy packages for your Visual Studio projects via Teamcity. To enable packaging for Octopus you’ll need to include the Octopack NuGet package to the project you are packaging. In my case this will be the Worker project since I’m only working with Microsoft Azure solutions at the moment. Read more →

Creating a deployment workflow with Octopus Deploy

The latest project I was working on didn’t have a continuous integration and continuous deployment environment set up yet. Creating a continuous integration environment was rather easy as we were already using Teamcity and adding a couple of builds isn’t much of a problem. The next logical step would be to start setting up continuous deployment. I started out by scripting a lot of PowerShell to manage our Azure environment like creating all SQL servers, databases, service busses, cloud services, etc. Read more →

Using Application Insights in your log4net application

In my previous post I’ve described how to use Application Insights and use it within your new web application. Most of us aren’t working in a greenfield project, so new solutions have to be integrated with the old. The project I’m working on uses log4net for logging messages, exceptions, etc. In order for us to use Application Insights, we had to search for a solution to integrate both. After having done some research on the subject we discovered this wasn’t a big problem. Read more →

Adding Application Insights to your application

Some time ago the Application Insights became available as a preview in the Azure portal. Application Insights helps you monitor the state of an application, server, clients, etc. As said, it’s still in preview, but it’s rather stable and very easy to use and implement in your applications. The documentation is still being worked on, but with all the getting started guides on the Microsoft site you can kick start your project with it in a couple of minutes. Read more →

Splitting and merging with Elastic Scale

Once you have set up your sharding solution with a fully configured Shard Map Manager, modified your data access layer to use Elastic Scale, added fault handling and running your stuff in production, there will be a time when you are in need to split, merge or move shardlets between shards. This is where the Elastic Scale Split Merge tool comes in place. The team has created a nice web application which will enable you to do this kind of management. Read more →