Warming up your App Service

Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc. I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions. Read more →

Automate deploying Azure Functions with VSTS

In the past couple of years the software industry has come a long way in professionalizing the development environment. One of the things which has improved significantly is automating the builds and being able to continuously deploy software. Having a continuous integration and -deployment environment is the norm nowadays, which means I (and probably you as a reader also) want to have this when creating Azure Functions also! There are dozens of build servers and deployment tools available, but because Azure Functions are highly likely being deployed in Microsoft Azure, it makes sense to use Visual Studio Team Services with Release Management. Read more →

Custom deployment steps for an Azure App Service

I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations. On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live. Read more →

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 →