News
Visual Studio Update Boosts Web Dev
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 for Converge360.