It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
Having interesting content? Share it!
Suggestion of the week
Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - Looking forward to this event. I have the pleasure to present a session with Jerry Nixon about Data API Builder. Join us!
Cloud
Demystifying Azure CLI pagnination (Jeremy Li) - That's great! It's so sad when all the information is "throw" on us without any control and it's on us to find our "needle" we are looking for in those screens full of line. This will definitely helps.
It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
What is an RDP Browser? (And How To Get One) (Peter) - A great alternative when you want to test on different browser or version of a browser, for gaming, And also for cyber security when investigating.
It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
Syncing a git branch between Windows and WSL filesystems (Andrew Lock) - It's true that by habit or reflex most people will think of Git as centralized... But it's not! Once you understand that so many possibilities are available. This post both summarize that and shows and example.
Low Code
Testing Your Native AOT Applications - .NET Blog (Marco Rossignoli, Jakub Jareš, Jakub Chocholowicz) - With code ahead-of-time (AOT) we still need tests but how to do it with that stripped version. of .NET? This short tutorial shows how.
How to automate tasks in Windows (David Nield) - Seeing things getting done by some automation you built is a nice feelingThis short post introduces 4 tools that will get you started with automation.
In this post, I will share a few things that we need our attention when deploying a .NET isolated Azure Function from GitHub to Azure using the Zip Deploy method. This method is great for fast deployment and when your artefacts are zipped in a package.
Note The complete code for this post is available on GitHub
Understanding Zip Push/Zip Deploy
Zip Push allows us to deploy a compressed package, such as a zip file, directly to Azure. It could be part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI-CD) or like in this example it could replace it. This approach is particularly useful when you want to ensure your artifacts remain unchanged across different environments or when aiming for the fastest deployment experience for users.
While CI-CD is excellent for keeping your code up-to-date, zip deployment offers the advantage of speed and consistency. It eliminates the need for compilation, leading to quicker uploads and deployments.
Preparing Your Package
It’s crucial to package with all necessary dependencies the code required. There is no operation to fetch any external packages during the deployment, the zip file will be decompressed and that's it. The best way to ensure you have everything you need is to publish your code, to a folder and then go in that folder and zip all the files.
dotnet publish -c Release -o ./out
Don't zip the folder, it won't work as expected.
You need to go inside the folder and select all the files and zip them to create your deployment artefact.
The next step is to make your artefact available online. There are many ways, but for this post we are using GitHub Realease. From the GitHub repository, create a new release, upload the zipped file created earlier and publish it. Note the URL of zipped files from the release.
Preparing The ARM Template
For this one-click deployment, we need an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. This is a document that describes the resources that we want to deploy to Azure. To deploy the zipped file into the Azure Function there are two particularities that required our attention.
Here we define an Windows Azure Function and the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE needs to be set to 1. The WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE is the key that tells Azure to use the zip file as the deployment artefact.
Then to specify where the zip file is located we need to add an extension to the Azure Function.
The packageUri property is the URL of the zipped file from the GitHub release. Note the dependsOn property that ensures the Azure Function is created before the extension is added. The complete ARM template is available in the GitHub repository.
One-click Deployment
When you have your artefact and the ARM template uploaded to your GitHub repository, you can create a one-click deployment button. This button will take the user to the Azure portal and pre-fill the deployment form with the information from the ARM template. Here is an example of the button for markdown.
[](https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template/uri/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FFBoucher%2FZipDeploy-AzFunc%2Fmain%2Fdeployment%2Fazuredeploy.json)
The has three parts, the first is the image that will be displayed on the button, the second is the link to the Azure portal and the third is the URL of the ARM template. The URL of the ARM template is the raw URL of the file in the GitHub repository, and it needs to be URL encoded. The URL encoding can be done using a tool like URL Encode/Decode.
Final Thoughts
Zip deployment is a powerful tool in your Azure arsenal by itself of part of a more complex CI-CD pipeline. It's a great way to make it easier for people to deploy your solution in their Azure subscription without having to clone/ fork the repository.
Video version
If you prefer, there is also have a video version of this post.
It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Is Your Container Image Really Distroless? (Laurent Goderre) - Nice post that explains a new way to improve security and more while building our container by going distroless.
Azure PowerShell Tips and Tricks (Paul Harrison) - PowerShell is a very interesting and useful script language.All those tips are pure wisdom!
DevOps
Beautiful .NET Test Reports Using GitHub Actions (Sean Killeen) - It's true that the unit test result in Azure DevOps looks amazing. Pretty nice adaptation in GitHub Action, could/ should it be native?
It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Blazor WebAssembly Virtual File System Access (Michael Washington) - A nice tutorial the show us how to keep file (aka data) in the browser of the visitor. All the code is available.
It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Last Friday, I encountered an issue while trying to run my Azure Function locally using VS Code. Despite having installed the Azure Function extension and the Azure Functions Core Tools, I was unable to execute the func start command without encountering an error saying that no functions could be found.
In this post, I will share the various troubleshooting steps I took, what didn’t work, and how I ultimately resolved the issue. Spoiler alert: everything is now working correctly.
The Problem
My Azure Function is a .NET 8 Isolated HTTP trigger. When I attempted to execute the func start command, it failed to find any functions. A quick look at the documentation, I discovered that version 4 of the Core Tools was required for type Isolated process. However, I had already installed version 4 via the update popup in VS Code.
Something was wrong. I tried func --version and it returned 3.x.xx, weird... And this is how I knew there was a problem.
Failed attempts
Following the Azure Functions Core Tools documentation I found that there were multiple methods to install the Core Tools. Because that laptop was on Windows 11, I started by downloading the func-cli-x64.msi installer and run it. It didn't work, the version 3 was still there.
I tried to install the Core Tools v4 using NPM: npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools@4. It didn't work.
I tried to uninstall the version 3 with npm uninstall -g azure-functions-core-tools. I tried using the command palette in VSCode
Still nothing was changing anything, the version 3 was still there.
The Solution
What works, was using Chocolatey command choco uninstall azure-functions-core-tools to uninstall the version 3. Some how, it must have been install at the different location or some "config" got lost at some point (it's a developer laptop after all), and the other methods (npm, msi, vscode) couldn't see that version 3 was installed.
After that, I installed the version 4 using NPM npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools@4. And it worked! The func --version returned 4.0.5571 and the func start command found my function.
I wrote this quick post hoping that it can help someone else, as I cannot be the only one with this problem.
