DevOps is a big deal in software development right now. Continuous Deployment (CD) is a big part of this trend. (Not to be confused with Continuous Integration, or CI.) You can find more technical definitions of Continuous Deployment, but it’s really about automating the process of getting new code onto your production servers after it has been built, tested and approved. The goal is make this as automated a process as possible, because when people have to manually copy files and change configuration settings – mistakes happen, no matter how many checklists you have.
If you are a ASP.Net developer (Framework or Core) and you’re using Azure App Services to host your application – your App Service can build your Azure DevOps pipeline for you. What’s a pipeline? Here’s a good introductory video:
Azure DevOps is the re-branded Team Foundation Services and I think it’s really good. (It’s free to setup an account for 5 users, so – if you’re already using Azure, why wouldn’t you try this?)
In the video, he demonstrates setting this up in the DevOps console. If you start from your Azure App Service console and go to the Deployment Center – it will create a starter pipeline and release for you. (Azure DevOps isn’t the only one it works with. I’ve used the integration to GitHub and more are listed.)
It just takes a couple of minutes and you should have a working pipeline. If you’ve been publishing from your development computer’s Visual Studio, you’ll want to delete the publishing profiles to remove the temptation of pushing directly. Now that you have the pipeline, always deploy using that.