Satalyst Brilliance on 10 Aug 2015

PT 2: Azure App Services in Visual Studio 2015 & VSO

Part Two: Build and Deploy an API App into Logic App.

In the next part of this blog series, we will try to extend the behaviour of the API App we have deployed an ARM template for in Azure. Please refer to part one of the blog post.

Step 1 – Flesh out a Simple API App

This step is already documented in this article Create API App. When creating your API app, make sure it has the same name as the App you have provisioned using Azure Resource Manager.

The Controller for our API App looks like this:

Controller for our API App_640x413

If we run this locally we have two ways to test that it works:

  • http://localhost:3134/swagger/ – this will open up the swagger page as shown below; this is a simple way to test an individual API APP.

swagger page_640x472

  • Use POSTMan to hit the service – configuration a Postman request as shown below will also allow us to exercise the API App locally.

Postman request_628x480

Both these options can be re-used once the resource has been deployed in Azure assuming the security permissions allow. Postman can also be used to trigger a logic app workflow.

Step 2 – Deploy API APP into Azure

To continue the theme of this series, we performed this using VSOnline Build – to deploy an API App we create a new Azure Web App Deployment. As long as our naming conventions are similar then this will deploy as our API APP.

Details on how to do this can be found https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/index.

Once the steps have been followed the configuration will look something like the screen shot below:

Azure Web App Deployment_640x239

Now when anything is checked in the pipeline will build and deploy the solution into Azure. There you have it a Logic app with a custom API app running in Azure and deployed using VSOnline Build.

Conclusions

Logic Apps / API Apps

Logic Apps – Already there is a very active Logic App Community you can follow them @logicappsio on twitter and subscribe to this channel.

Some of the excellent community involvement already includes:

  • TRex – Meta Data Generation for your Logic APP

And some great blogs on how you can use Logic apps to help with:

  • Office 365 Provisioning
  • Connecting to On-Premise SQL Data

Visual Studio Online/ TFS 2015 Build

Although the new build templating engine on VSOnline and TFS 2105 is a large step forward from what has gone before in TFS, it still lacks certain basic features that are available out of the box with similar CI/CD tools. Features such as:

  • Setting Dependant Build Configurations
  • SCM Build Triggers can’t be filtered beyond branch level for a Git project.

Integrations into deployment tools (specifically Octopus deploy) are basic.
The Team City / Octopus tool set, in my opinion is still the tool combination of choice when it comes to supporting a CD/CI build pipleline.

— The END

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