Monday, October 10, 2016

Getting started with creating custom Build and Release tasks for VSO

You'll need to follow the steps below in order to get started:
1) Install npm for Windows if you haven't already
2) Once npm is successfully installed and available in your PATH, execute the following command to install the TFX command line package: "install -g tfx-cli"
3) Once you've installed TFX, find a folder in which you want to work to create your package, and execute a command similar to the following: "tfx build tasks create"
4) After you finish answering the questions asked by the program, you'll have a template folder for your custom build task that you can bundle up with tfx and publish to VSO.

Friday, October 07, 2016

Passing parameters from a resource group template in Azure to a WebJob

As it turns out, WebJobs retrieve their connectionStrings and appSettings from the Azure app service blade settings, same as the web application in which they're running! You can just use the built-in "connectionstrings" and "appsettings" resources underneath a Web Application in your Resource group template to populate these values for the WebJobs right from your template. This is particularly useful for things like WebJobs dashboard and storage connection strings.  Microsoft could really have done a better job of advertising this fact.