Visual Studio Update Boosts Web Dev -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Update Boosts Web Dev

By David Ramel
08/20/2018

The recent release of Visual Studio 2017 15.8 featured a bevy of improvements for Web developers, ranging from Docker containers to Azure Functions.

Microsoft detailed the enhancements in a blog post, which highlighted the following:

Custom docker image tags during Publish: Web devs can now customize the "Image tag" for Docker containers when publishing them to a container registry. The value can either be automatically generated by Visual Studio every time a container is published (the previous behavior), or it be manually changed to provide a consistent tag (for example, "latest").
Zip push deployment for Azure Functions: Visual Studio now provides the option to deploy and run Azure Functions projects as zip files.
Managing Azure Functions application settings: After publishing an Azure Functions project using Visual Studio, the application settings can be managed from the publish summary.
Enabling Application Insights as part of publishing to Azure App Service: When publishing to Azure App Service, Visual Studio asks developers to either create a new App Service or re-use an existing one. If the option to create a new App Service to host an application is chosen, Visual Studio now offers the ability to also provision and configure Application Insights.
Managing user secrets in ASP.NET Framework projects (targeting .NET 4.7.1 or higher) work projects: Bringing ASP.NET Framework projects up to par with ASP.NET Core is support for storing application secrets (for example connection strings, API keys and so on) in a file outside of source control unique to each user. Now Web developers can right-click on a project in Solution Explorer and select "Manage User Secrets" with .NET Framework 4.7.1 and Visual Studio 15.8.
Optimizing build performance for solutions containing ASP.NET Frame: There's now a new menu item under Build | ASP.NET Compilation | Optimize Build Performance for Solution.
Author and source information for ASP.NET Core templates: The dialog for new ASP.NET Core projects now displays the author and source for the selected template.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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