Tag: Visual Studio

Working with remotes in Git, GitHub and Visual Studio

Mohit GoyalLeave a comment

In previous post, we discussed about how to work with remotes in Git at command line. In this post, we are going to discuss how we can do the same from the very comforts of Visual Studio while we continue to host our source code on the GitHub. While it’s true that there is no command or built-in option available in Visual Studio to connect to GitHub, we can leverage one of the extensions available for GitHub.

Install GitHub Extension for Visual Studio

To search for this extension, let’s open Visual Studio first. From the tool bar menu, select Tools and then click on the ‘Extensions and Updates’:
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Compare SQL Database Schema and deploy changes using Visual Studio

Mohit Goyal4 Comments

Many a times, you would need to identify the difference in database schema for two SQL databases so that you can take certain course of action. There are a lot of tools in market which can do this, but you would need to pay for them to get full difference or to use them on continuous basis. However, Microsoft Visual Studio has this functionality built-in for you and if you happen to use Visual Studio as your code development tool, this functionality is basically free. So in this scenario, it also prevents hassle of learning another tool. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to do the same using Visual Studio.

Caution – I am going to demo this Visual Studio Enterprise. I’m not sure what all sku’s it is associated with, so if you cannot repeat steps below, you might want to check that. Read More »

Continuous Integration and Deployment for SQL Database using SSDT and VSTS

Mohit Goyal11 Comments

The combination of technical and cultural processes behind databases makes automation difficult. Databases has a state associated with them, so you cannot blow them away like application code and create again from scratch without losing the data. Managing change in a way that doesn’t impact the data is very problematic. Combine that with the cultural issues, the silos, it creates a really difficult problem. There are some general best practices that you can apply to tackle a lot of this complexity, but any time you try to design the solution and get into the technicalities, a lot of time you end up implementing something very specific to a particular type of database. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to use SSDT to implement continuous integration and deployment for SQL database Schema to take some of these worries away.

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Create Azure App Service using Azure ARM and deploy using Visual Studio

Mohit GoyalLeave a comment

In few of the previous blog posts, we discussed on what Azure ARM is and how it helps in the DevOps philosophy of Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC). So we’ll build further on that knowledge. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to create an Azure App service using ARM template.

We’ll be using Visual Studio 2017 for this post’s purpose. It is not necessary to use this, you can use just Visual Studio code and appropriate extension for ARM or you can use a simple notepad (as all ARM templates are JSON files in the end of the day) or any other editor of your choice. However, using Visual Studio 2017 further simplifies it. Read More »

Compare files with Visual Studio

Mohit GoyalLeave a comment

Visual Studio 2015 file comparison tool can be considered good enough for most of the use cases. Before learning how to compare files with Visual Studio, I used to use WinMerge, or another tool to compare. Not anymore of that!

What is still missing in the IDE is a small menu that allows us to select 2 files and compare them. From command line, you can do it with devenv.exe /diff which compares two files. It takes four parameters:
SourceFile, TargetFile, SourceDisplayName(optional), TargetDisplayName(optional)Read More »