Your 2020 Study Guide to Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400)

With Microsoft announcing sweeping changes to a few Azure exams later in March 2020 the time is ripe to blog about an exam I’ve had my eye on for a while: Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400). This is an advanced exam that targets professionals familiar with Azure administration and Azure development. I can see this exam providing value to engineers, consultants, and architects who are driving for increased adoption of Agile practices and Infrastructure as Code.

After doing a few of these exams over the years you’ll find a rhythm that works for you.… [Keep reading] “Your 2020 Study Guide to Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400)”

Integration Testing Timer-Triggered Precompiled v2 Azure Functions

In a recent post, I described a way to run integration tests against precompiled C# Azure Functions using the v2 runtime. In that post, we looked at an example of invoking an HTTP-triggered function from within an integration test.

Of course, there are plenty of other triggers available for Azure Functions too. Recently I needed to write an integration test against a timer-triggered function and decided to investigate the best way to do this.

The Azure Functions runtime provides a convenient API for invoking a timer-trigger function.… [Keep reading] “Integration Testing Timer-Triggered Precompiled v2 Azure Functions”

Integration Testing Precompiled v2 Azure Functions

Azure Functions code can often contain important functionality that needs to be tested. The two most common ways of testing code are unit testing and integration testing. Unit testing runs pieces of code in isolation, and this is relatively simple to do with Azure Functions. Integration testing can be a little trickier though, and I haven’t found any good documentation about how do this with version 2 of the Functions runtime. In this post I’ll outline the approach I’m using to run integration tests against my Azure Functions v2 code.… [Keep reading] “Integration Testing Precompiled v2 Azure Functions”

Deploying App Services with ‘Run From Package’, Azure Storage, and Azure Pipelines

Azure App Service recently introduced a feature called Run From Package. Rather than uploading our application binaries and other files to an App Service directly, we can instead package them into a zip file and provide App Services with the URL. This is a useful feature because it eliminates issues with file locking during deployments, it allows for atomic updates of application code, and it reduces the time required to boot an application. It also means that the ‘release’ of an application simply involves the deployment of a configuration setting.… [Keep reading] “Deploying App Services with ‘Run From Package’, Azure Storage, and Azure Pipelines”