Microsoft has invested billions in Azure to drive technology and also hired best of the minds on this planet. From last few months, Azure has been launching new container-focused products and services on a regular basis. One of these products is Azure Container Instances. It acts as a bridge between platform as a service and infrastructure as a service architecture. Perhaps it would be okay to call this service as “Container as a Service”. Azure Container Instances (ACI) allows to rapidly create and launch containerized applications, without any overhead and with an easily scriptable set of commands. Designed to work both on its own and with tools like Kubernetes, ACI adds container-management commands to Azure, coupling them with a billing model that’s based on per-second usage, with no need to create and deploy (and pay for) container hosts. In this blog post, we’ll create an ASP.NET Core App, containerize it and deploy it as single instance on ACI. Continue reading “Deploy ASP.NET Core App as Azure Containers Instances (ACI)”
ASP.NET Core App fails to start with error: ‘A path base can only be configured using IApplicationBuilder.UsePathBase().’
In one of the cases with setting up builds for new source code repositories we came across this issue. One of the microservices was written in ASP.NET core using Visual Studio. It was working fine using Visual Studio or when hosted using IIS, but it fails to start with below error when using dotnet native command inside docker image. The error message was like below:
System.InvalidOperationException: A path base can only be configured using IApplicationBuilder.UsePathBase().
at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel.Core.Internal.AddressBinder.d__7.MoveNext()
— End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown —
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
Continue reading “ASP.NET Core App fails to start with error: ‘A path base can only be configured using IApplicationBuilder.UsePathBase().’”
Build ASP.NET Core Web App and deploy as Azure Web App on Containers
Azure Web Apps or Azure App Service Web Apps or simply Azure Websites is a PaaS service from Microsoft Azure which can be used to host web apps or APIs build using a variety of programming languages like ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Java, Ruby, PHP etc. It is also optimized for hosting web applications and containers, in case the SDK version required is not already supported by Web Apps. Rather than using ACS (Azure Container Services) and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), Azure Web Apps are more suitable for deploying long running containers. Also they become more affordable in terms of pricing as compared to the ACS and AKS. In this post, we’ll discuss how to create a very basic ASP.NET Core App and then deploy it as a container on Azure Web App. Continue reading “Build ASP.NET Core Web App and deploy as Azure Web App on Containers”
Dotnet Core 2.0 build fails with Error MSB4062: The “GetDotNetHost” task could not be loaded from the assembly
We were recently observing this issue with one of the new source code repositories for a solution that was written in .NET Core 2.0. The source code was coded using Visual Studio and it was working fine on the developers machine. However, when building it using dotnet core publish task, it kept failing with below error:
T12:47:54.2728059Z C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService.nuget\packages\microsoft.aspnetcore.mvc.razor.viewcompilation\2.0.4\build\netstandard2.0\Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Razor.ViewCompilation.targets(45,5): error MSB4062: The “GetDotNetHost” task could not be loaded from the assembly C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService.nuget\packages\microsoft.aspnetcore.mvc.razor.viewcompilation\2.0.4\build\netstandard2.0\Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Razor.ViewCompilation.Tasks.dll. Assembly with same name is already loaded Confirm that the declaration is correct, that the assembly and all its dependencies are available, and that the task contains a public class that implements Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask
Continue reading “Dotnet Core 2.0 build fails with Error MSB4062: The “GetDotNetHost” task could not be loaded from the assembly”
Remove Docker Containers, Images, Volumes and Networks
Containerization has solved many issues related to traditional IT software. Docker and containers are almost synonymous as Docker makes it easy to wrap your applications and services in containers so you can run them anywhere. However as you work with Docker, you accumulate an excessive number of unused images, containers, and data volumes that clutter the output and consume disk space. Overtime it becomes necessary to clean up the clutter to claim disk space back and also prevent from disk getting full.
Fortunately, Docker has also certain inbuilt commands to clean up the system from the command line itself. This blog post aims to cover some of those commands that are useful for freeing disk space and keeping the system organized by removing unused Docker images, containers and volumes.
Continue reading “Remove Docker Containers, Images, Volumes and Networks”
Change default and compare branch in VSTS
Part of the source code management is to be able to quickly determine the difference between your branch and the main development branch. Usually this happens to be the master but this can quickly change if you are following feature based development or trunk based development. VSTS has the concept of the compare branch where it would provide the number of commits ahead or behind data for all other branches. This helps one in quickly determining the related information by just taking a glance at the branch page.
To set a different branch as the compare branch, select the branch in the reference and click on the three dot icon:
Continue reading “Change default and compare branch in VSTS”
Terraform for the Azure ARM Developers
HashiCorp has launched 1.10 of the Terraform launching many more azure services than they used to for the Azure Provider. More details can be read here on their github page. Up until now, Azure ARM has been the choice of Azure Automation for DevOps practitioners. Since terraform can be used to automatically provision resources across major cloud providers, it is better to learn terraform sooner rather than later. In this blog post, we’ll see how the Terraform translates with respect to Azure ARM and understand its way of doing things.
Providers
Terraform allows to create, configure and manage almost all types of resources from on-premise physical machines to cloud based resources. Continue reading “Terraform for the Azure ARM Developers”
