Signing applications is a requirement for deploying a desktop or mobile application and can be fiddly. Microsoft’s Azure Artifact Signing always looked to me like a good solution in that the pricing is reasonable at $9.99 per month for up to 5,000 signings, and it is run by Microsoft so one would think that the certificates will be satisfactory for Windows users.
This week I got started with the service. Microsoft has a handy quickstart guide and the first thing to note is that availability is limited to USA and Canada for individual developers, or USA, Canada, EU and UK for organizations. Luckily I work for a small UK limited company so qualify as an organization.
I also noted that a pay as you go Azure subscription is required; if you have a sponsored subscription that will not work.
The first step is to create an Artifact Signing Account. Billing starts from when this account is created, even if you are unsuccessful in obtaining a signing certificate. Should this be the case, make sure to delete the account.
Next, check the roles assigned to the user that will operate the code signing. There are two: Artifact Signing Identity Verifier and Artifact Signing Certificate Profile Signer. I assigned them both to my Entra ID user.
Now there are two steps to obtaining a certificate profile. The first is Identity Validation. In my case this is for an organization; you will need a DUNS number, two valid email addresses, a functioning web site, and the first and last name of the individual that will use the service. The organization address should match the one recorded at Companies House, even if day to day work is done elsewhere.
The organization identity verification automatically progresses to individual identity verification. In my case this was done by a company called AU10TIX and I was able to use a UK driving licence.
Next I hit what looked like a roadblock. I received an email asking me to verify my email address; however clicking the link got me a web page stating “the request is blocked” and “service unavailable”. Thinking that perhaps the service was unavailable, I tried several times and on different networks. I am not the first to experience this. I was on the point of raising a support case when I got a further email advising that validation was complete.
Once identity validation is complete you can create a certificate profile. The type I need is called Public Trust. I had several mysterious failures with uninformative errors; I suspect this might be to do with non-unique profile names but no idea really. Again I was on the point of contacting support when I tried a new profile name and it worked.
The quickstart guide ends at this point and the next document you need is the one on setting up signing integrations. You will need a recent Windows SDK including SignTool.exe, the .NET 8.0 runtime, and the Azure Artifact Signing client tools, if like me you want to sign a Windows executable.
Then you need to create a JSON file traditionally called metadata.json, and a command to sign the file. The command will be lengthy so fire up Notepad or similar and put it in a .cmd file or similar. You need to discover the location of SignTool and the location of Azure.CodeSigning.Dlib.dll and note that there are different x64 and x86 versions.
The command includes a timestamp without which the code signing is useless as the certificate has a lifetime of just three days.
I carefully assembled the command and I am happy to report that it worked first time.
Output from code signing command
So far so good. The whole process is somewhat intricate but I am hoping this will prove a good solution for Windows.
One of the oddities of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is that it is free to use for almost anything other than the company’s own .NET platform. That is, there is nothing to stop developers from coding in C# with VS Code and using the .net command-line tools without paying Microsoft for a license; but the official C# Dev Kit extension requires a license for teams of 6 developers or more:
For personal, academic, and open-source projects, C# Dev Kit can be used at no cost. For commercial purposes, teams of up to 5 can also use the C# Dev Kit at no cost. For 6+ developers, those users will need a Visual Studio Professional (or higher) subscription.
In addition, there are licensing restrictions on Microsoft’s .NET debugger which impact VS Code forks:
The C# extension for Visual Studio Code includes the Microsoft .NET Core Debugger (vsdbg). Unlike VS Code, and most other parts of the .NET Core ecosystem, vsdbg is not an open source product but rather is a proprietary part of Visual Studio. It is licensed to work only with IDEs from Microsoft — Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, or Visual Studio for Mac.
JetBrains has now introduced C# debugging support for the ReSharper VS Code extension, which means there is now another high quality option for developers who either prefer not to use the C# Dev Kit, or are using a VS Code fork such as AWS Kiro, Cursor, Windsurf or Google Antigravity, for which the official .NET debugger is not licensed.
ReSharper is free for non-commercial use, or costs £119.00 ($149.00) per year for an individual or £295.00 ($389.00) per year for developers working for an organization. The cheapest standalone Visual Studio Professional plan is currently $540.00 per year, though some developers will get it bundled with other plans.
Leaving aside licensing and cost considerations, how does ReSharper compare to C# DevKit and the Microsoft .NET debugger? I have yet to use ReSharper so do not have a personal opinion; but will note that Microsoft’s recent change which removed the Solution Explorer is unpopular.
Finally, my personal view is that Microsoft has more to gain by making .NET and its tooling fully open, than by playing games with licensing restrictions in an effort to keep developers hooked to Visual Studio or VS Code.
What framework to choose for a cross-platform .NET GUI application continues to be awkward, with multiple good-ish options but no obvious first choice.
The three leading contenders are Microsoft’s MAUI (multi-platform app UI), third-party Avalonia UI, and third-party Uno Platform.
Joseph Tomkinson, head of software engineering at the British Heart Foundation, has an excellent post on the pros and cons of MAUI vs Avalonia UI, noting the fundamental difference that MAUI wraps native controls while Avalonia UI does all its own rendering. Tomkinson argues that MAUI has stronger mobile support (since this has only come recently to Avalonia) but that Avalonia has advantages in consistency, desktop performance, and Linux support.
A concern with Avalonia UI has been the drift towards important features becoming commercial-only, not unreasonable but a barrier to adoption for some developers. That has improved though since a sponsor appeared to fund Avalonia open-source development. CEO Mike James (formerly at Xamarin and then Microsoft) has posted about the difference this has made.
According to James, the Avalonia UI team has more than doubled, to 20 people, and now includes a QA lead. He says usage is growing:
“In the whole of 2025, Avalonia projects were built over 122 million times. In the first six months of 2026 alone, that figure has already passed 410 million.”
I am not sure exactly what this metric is counting – telemetry every time a developer builds a project? – but presuming it is like with like, that is impressive.
On the MAUI side though, one thing Tomkinson notes is that third-party components are more widely available, because it is an official Microsoft framework, and that quality is much better now than it was early on.
The BigCorp factor is not entirely in MAUI’s favour though. Microsoft might change direction and decide MAUI is no longer important, particularly as its own internal usage of the framework still seems minimal.
I am inclined to try building an example project in both frameworks to get my own feel for which would work best.
I have a .Net project which is largely developed on a Mac using Visual Studio Code and deployed to an Azure Web App service using Azure DevOps Pipelines.
This works pretty well, though occasionally a pipeline fails because of a timeout, and works next time round.
Recently though I made some changes including upgrading to .Net 10 and migrating to Central Package Management (CPM). CPM is to my mind a great feature though seemingly little used. It means that package versions are defined in a single file at the root of the solution, and applied to all projects. Package versions are no longer specified in the individual .csproj project files. It means you have consistent package versions and simplifies upgrades. If for some compatibility reason you need different versions, there are ways to override CPM.
Everything worked fine in development but the pipeline no longer worked. The pipeline runs on Ubuntu and failed with the error:
NU1015: The following PackageReference item(s) do not have a version specified
for all the Nuget packages in the solution.
I loaded the solution in Visual Studio 2026 and everything worked fine there. I resorted to using the Visual Studio publish tool instead of the pipeline as a workaround. The pipeline works better for me though, as it runs automatically on all commits, running a suite of tests before actually deploying, and lets me work entirely on a Mac.
I made a bug report and got some well-intended advice that did not fix the problem.
Then, scrutinising the project one more time, I noticed that the documented name for the critical file that enables CPM is:
Directory.Packages.props
whereas I had:
Directory.Packages.Props
This worked fine on Windows and Mac which are mostly not case-sensitive file systems, but not on Ubuntu. I am not sure why I typed it wrong though I’ve noticed looking around that there are other references to using Directory.Packages.Props so I am not the only one.
After that I just had to figure out how to change the case of the filename on GitHub (temporarily set the config to core.ignorecase false) and everything worked.
PS: I am not sure why Visual Studio 2026 does not provide any UI for setting Central Package Management. This is likely a major reason why it is little used.
Several years ago I created a web application using ASP.NET and Azure AD authentication. The requirement was that only members of certain security groups could access the application, and the level of access varied according to the group membership. Pretty standard one would think.
The application has been running well but stopped working – because it used ADAL (Azure Active Directory Authentication Library) and the Microsoft Graph API with the old graph.windows.net URL both of which are deprecated.
No problem, I thought, I’ll quickly run up a new application using the latest libraries and port the code across. Easier than trying to re-plumb the existing app because this identity stuff is so fiddly.
Latest Visual Studio 2022 17.13.6. Create new application and choose ASP.NET Core Web App (Razor Pages) which is perhaps the primary .NET app framework.
Next the wizard tells me I need to install the dotnet msidentity tool – a dedicated tool for configuring ASP.NET projects to use the Microsoft identity platform. OK.
I have to sign in to my Azure tenancy (expected) and register the app. Here I can see existing registrations or create a new one. I create a new one:
I continue in the wizard but it errors:
This does not appear to be an easy fix. I click Back and ask the wizard just to update the project code. I will add packages and do other configuration manually. Though as it turned out the failed step had actually added packages and the app does already work. However Visual Studio is warning me that the version of Microsoft.Identity.Web installed has a critical security vulnerability. I edit Nuget packages and update to version 3.8.3.
The app works and I can sign in but it is necessary to take a close look at the app registration. By default my app allows anyone with any Entra ID or personal Microsoft account to sign in. I feel this is unlikely to be what many devs intend and that the default should be more restricted. What you have to do (if this is not what you want) is to head to the Azure portal, Entra ID, App registrations, find your app, and edit the manifest. I edited the signInAudience from AzureADandPersonalMicrosoftAccount to be AzureADMyOrg:
noting that Microsoft has not been able to eliminate AzureAD from its code despite the probably misguided rename to Entra ID.
However my application has no concept of restriction by security group. I’ve added a group called AccessITWritingApp and made myself a member, but getting the app to read this turns out to be awkward. There are a couple of things to be done.
First, while we are in the App Registration, find the bit that says Token Configuration and click Edit Groups Claim. This will instruct Azure to send group membership with the access token so our app can read it. Here we have a difficult decision.
If we choose all security groups, this will send all groups with the token including users who are in a group within a group – but only up to a limit of somewhere between 6 and 200. If we choose Groups assigned to the application we can limit this to just AccessITWritingApp but this will only work for direct members. By the way, you will have to assign the group to the app in Enterprise applications in the Azure portal but the app might not appear there. You can do this though via the Overview in the App registration and clicking the link for Manage application in local directory. Why two sections for app registrations? Why is the app both in and not in Enterprise applications? I am sure it makes sense to someone.
In the enterprise application you can click Assign users and groups and add the AccessITWritingWebApp group – though only if you have a premium “Active Directory plan level” meaning a premium Entra ID directory plan level. There is some confusion about this.
Another option is App Roles. You can assign App Roles to a user of the application with a standard (P1) Entra ID subscription. Information on using App Roles rather than groups, or alongside them, is here. Though note:
“Currently, if you add a service principal to a group, and then assign an app role to that group, Microsoft Entra ID doesn’t add the roles claim to tokens it issues.”
Note that assigning a group or a user here will not by default either allow or prevent access for other users. It does link the user or group with the application and makes it visible to them. If you want to restrict access for a user you can do it by checking the Assignment required option in the enterprise application properties. That is not super clear either. Read up on the details here and note once again that nested group memberships are not supported “at this time” which is a bit rubbish.
OK, so we are going down the groups route. What I want to do is to use ASP.NET Core role-based authorization. I create a new Razor page called SecurePage and at the top of the code-behind class I stick this attribute:
[Authorize(Roles = "AccessITWritingApp,[yourGroupID")]
public class SecurePageModel : PageModel
Notice I am using the GroupID alongside the group name as that seems to be what arrives in the token.
Now I run the app, I can sign in, but when I try to access SecurePage I get Access Denied.
We have to make some changes for this to work. First, add a Groups section to appsettings.json like this:
// Add services to the container.
builder.Services.AddAuthentication(OpenIdConnectDefaults.AuthenticationScheme)
.AddMicrosoftIdentityWebApp(builder.Configuration.GetSection("AzureAd"));
and change it to:
// Add services to the container.
builder.Services.AddAuthentication(OpenIdConnectDefaults.AuthenticationScheme)
.AddMicrosoftIdentityWebApp(options =>
{
// Ensure default token validation is carried out
builder.Configuration.Bind("AzureAd", options);
// The following lines code instruct the asp.net core middleware to use the data in the "roles" claim in the [Authorize] attribute, policy.RequireRole() and User.IsInRole()
// See https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/security/authorization/roles for more info.
options.TokenValidationParameters.RoleClaimType = "groups";
options.Events.OnTokenValidated = async context =>
{
if (context != null)
{
List requiredGroupsIds = builder.Configuration.GetSection("Groups")
.AsEnumerable().Select(x => x.Value).Where(x => x != null).ToList();
// Calls method to process groups overage claim (before policy checks kick-in)
//await GraphHelper.ProcessAnyGroupsOverage(context, requiredGroupsIds, cacheSettings);
}
await Task.CompletedTask;
};
}
);
Run the app, and now I can access SecurePage:
There are a few things to add though. Note I have commented a call to GraphHelper; you might want to uncomment this but there are further steps if you do. GraphHelper is custom code in this sample https://github.com/Azure-Samples/active-directory-aspnetcore-webapp-openidconnect-v2/ and specifically the one in 5-WebApp-AuthZ/g-2-Groups. I do not think I could have got this working without this sample.
The sample does something clever though. If the token does not supply all the groups of which the user is a member, it calls a method called ProcessAnyGroupsOverage which eventually calls graphClient.Me.GetMemberGroups to get all the groups of which the user is a member. As far as I can tell this does retrieve membership via nested groups though note there is a limit of 11,000 results.
Note that in the above I have not described how to install the GraphClient as there are a few complications, mainly regarding permissions.
It is all rather gnarly and I was surprised that years after I coded the first version of this application there is still no simple method such as graphClient.isMemberOf() that discovers if a user is a member of a specific group; or a simple way of doing this that supports nested groups which are often easier to manage than direct membership.
Further it is disappointing to get errors with Visual Studio templates that one would have thought are commonly used.
And another time perhaps I will describe the issues I had deploying the application to Azure App Service – yes, more errors despite a very simple application and using the latest Visual Studio wizard.
I have a bridge platform (yes the game) written in C# which I am gradually improving. Like many bridge applications it makes use of the open source double dummy solver (DDS) by Bo Haglund and Soren Hein.
My own project started out on Windows and is deployed to Linux (on Azure) but I now develop it mostly on a Mac with Visual Studio Code. The DDS library is cross-platform and I have compiled it for Windows, Linux and Mac – I had some issues with a dependency, described here, which taught me a lot about the Linux app service on Azure, among other things.
Unfortunately though the library has never worked with C# on the Mac – until today that is. I could compile it successfully with Xcode, it worked with its own test application dtest, but not from C#. This weekend I decided to investigate and see if I could fix it.
I have an Xcode project which includes both dtest and the DDS library, which is configured as a dynamic library. What I wanted to do was to debug the C++ code from my .NET application. For this purpose I did not use the ASP.Net bridge platform but a simple command line wrapper for DDS which I wrote some time back as a utility. It uses the same .NET wrapper DLL for DDS as the bridge platform. The problem I had was that when the application called a function from the DDS native library, it printed: Memory::GetPtr 0 vs. 0 and then quit.
The error from my .NET wrapper
I am not all that familiar with Xcode and do not often code in C++ so debugging this was a bit of an adventure. In Xcode, I went to Product – Scheme – Edit Scheme, checked Debug executable under Info, and then selected the .NET application which is called ddscs.
Adding the .NET application as the executable for debugging.
I also had to add an argument under Arguments passed on Launch, so that my application would exercise the library.
Then I could go to Product – Run and success, I could step through the C++ code called by my .NET application. I could see that the marshalling was working fine.
Stepping through the C++ code in Xcode
Now I could see where my error message came from:
The source of my error message.
So how to fix it? The problem was that DDS sets how much memory it allows itself to use and it was set to zero. I looked at the dtest application and noticed this line of code:
This is closely related to another DDS function called SetMaxThreads. I looked at the docs for DDS and found this remark:
The number of threads is automatically configured by DDS on Windows, taking into account the number of processor cores and available memory. The number of threads can be influenced using by calling SetMaxThreads. This function should probably always be called on Linux/Mac, with a zero argument for auto configuration.
“Probably” huh! So I added this to my C# wrapper, using something I have not used before, a static constructor. It just called SetMaxThreads(0) via P/Invoke.
Everything started working. Like so many programming issues, simple when one has figured out the problem!
I am developing an application which is deployed to Azure App Service. It runs on .NET 5.0 on Linux. I have set up a simple DevOps process so that committing changes to GitHub runs an Azure DevOps pipeline that deploys the application to a staging slot on Azure App Service for Linux. Then I can use Swap in the Azure portal to update the production slot. Swap simply exchanges the content of the staging slot with that in the production slot, so there is a route back in the event of disaster. Swap also restarts the application and forces users to log back in.
Yesterday I fixed a bug, deployed the change to the staging slot, and performed a swap. Logged back into the application, but the bug was still there, though intermittent. That was the bit I could not figure out: what was causing the code to behave differently on different requests? I became suspicious that it was sometimes serving the old version. I proved this by refreshing a page that demonstrated the bug. My page has an application version in the footer, and I could see that when the bug appeared, the version was older.
Well this is odd. In the App Service Deployment slot settings I have traffic set to 100% for the production slot:
In general I tend to assume a bug in my code or an error in my configuration settings is more likely than an issue with the Azure App Service. This does look odd though: why, if traffic is going 100% to the production slot, does the application sometimes serve the old version?
The pragmatic fix was easy. A second deployment to the staging slot means both now have code that works. The bug no longer appears; but I have kept the version number different and can see that the issue is actually still occurring.
I will update this post when I have more information, just in case anyone else hits this issue.
I am developing a web site for playing bridge, a project which kicked off in March when lockdown caused bridge clubs everywhere to close. There are lots of sites where you can play bridge online, but not many options (particularly back in March) for clubs that wanted to run their own online sessions.
It’s going OK with a number of clubs now using it every week, though it is still in development. I have learned a painful lesson though. In order to proceed as quickly as possible, I started my project with the Visual Studio template for an ASP.Net Core application with ASP.NET Core Identity – the latter an easy decision since it handles all the complications of registration, password reset and so on. (I did end up having to re-plumb it to use int rather than GUID for the primary key but that is another story).
The default home page the template generates looks like this, with options in the menu to Register or Login.
Registration and login are fundamental concepts that have been part of the web forever. It’s simple for a developer to understand: you register to create an account, you login if you already have an account.
The painful discovery is that this is not obvious to everyone, particularly to an older demographic that did not grow up with computers. Another factor is that cookies, browser-saved passwords and single sign-on with Google/Facebook etc means that this whole area is a bit of a mess and there are people who just kinda expect web sites to know who they are (which in one way horrifies me but I do see the massive convenience).
The consequence is that a surprising (to me) number of people had difficulty knowing whether Registration or Login was what they needed. They would Register, then return to the site and hit Register again. Why is this site asking for my details again? Maybe a security thing? Oh no, why does it now say username not available?
This is because asking the user to make this choice is not good design. Registration is rare, login is common. Further, Register is a confusing word. We sometimes use the word register when accounts already exist. Create Account is better. And a better UI is just Login. I need to access this website. Then, underneath the username/password request, an option that says “I need to create an account”. The two options should not be equally prominent; and if you look at how many prominent sites design this, that is what they do:
Lesson learned; but I wish this had occurred to me sooner!
I am a duplicate bridge player in my spare time and enjoyed playing in my local club once or twice a week. That was before COVID-19 and then, in March this year, lockdown. Bridge clubs were no longer able to meet. There are more important things in the world; but bridge is both a lot of fun and a welcome distraction from weightier matters, and my thoughts soon turned to what we could do to continue playing in these new circumstances.
The answer was to play online; but while there are plenty of ways to play bridge online, the existing systems were not designed with the idea of being a way for bridge clubs to meet in a new context. If anything, the reverse is true: online bridge site were designed for people who could not easily get to a club or wanted to play at any time with whoever else happened to be available. Clubs like my own, by contrast, wanted to replicate their face-to-face meetings with an online equivalent. A further complication back in March was that the biggest online bridge site, called Bridgebase, was immediately overloaded and declared that it was unwilling to allow new people to qualify as directors, people allowed to run online bridge sessions.
My immediate instinct was to build a new site for playing bridge. I was not quite starting from scratch. Back in the early days of Windows 8, I started work on a bridge game for Microsoft’s new and as it turned out ill-fated platform. I had got some way with it; I had created a bridge engine that understood about cards and hands and tricks and shuffling and scoring and all the various elements that go into playing bridge. It was written in C# and what is now UWP XAML. It is designed of course for a solo player. Here is the bidding screen:
and the play screen:
This is how it looks on Windows 10; it looked a bit better on Windows 8 though it would not win any prizes for design. My software could play bridge though; the reason I never finished it was that I never cracked getting the AI working. But for human to human play that did not matter. A weekend or two coding, I thought, and I could have a website up and running so our club could play bridge online. I made an immediate start, registering the domain name YourBridgeClubOnline.co.uk.
It is, I have to say, still under development. But it works and we have been able to play bridge again, as a club.
What took you so long? Ha! Much of my old bridge engine code remains untouched and has proved useful; it all runs fine on .NET Core. Even the (useless) AI has been handy, as I can test the mechanics of play without involving others. But I had, of course, wildly underestimated the problem of converting a game for solo play on Windows, to a multi-player web application. There is much to think about:
The UI. I am not a designer (I am sure you can tell) but spent ages puzzling over how to get a workable user interface in the browser for everything from tablets to desktops. Not smartphones yet but it is coming. I decided early on to take a view on compatibility. No Internet Explorer. JavaScript fetch API is required. When time is against you, it is easier to say, just use another browser, than to waste too much time supporting old browsers.
Messaging – both the API kind, and the chat kind. I am using C#, ASP.NET Core and SignalR. In general it works well. SignalR uses WebSockets as first preference, but falls back to Server Sent Events or long polling where necessary. In my first experiments I did my own polling and switching to SignalR was a great relief.
Registration and login. I am using the stuff that comes in the box, ASP.NET Core Identity. It has saved me a ton of work. It’s a bit annoying and not too well documented. I don’t really like using GUIDs for the primary key, for example, and I believe there is way to avoid it, but it isn’t top priority when you are going for Minimum Viable Product.
JavaScript. I’ve written tons of it and I don’t even like the language. I have a new respect for it though. The thing is, it is very fast and there is nothing you cannot do. The worst thing is the friction of doing some debugging in the browser, and some in Visual Studio. I am thinking of switching to VS Code for development since it works nicely with ASP.NET Core and is better for JavaScript than Visual Studio.
Scoring. My Windows software could score a hand of bridge. But duplicate is different; you have to compare the scores with others who played the same hands and work out the percentages, then export the results to standard formats for display on club websites and submission to the English Bridge Union. It was more work than I had expected and I am not done yet; the system only understands Pairs at the moment, not Teams (a different way of scoring).
Directing. Someone has to manage an online bridge session, settle any arguments, and fix errors like cards played by accident. It all needs coding and there was nothing like it in the Windows version.
Movements. Imagine you have 28 people playing bridge (or 14 pairs). They need to all play the same hands, but never play the same hand twice, and it has to be so arranged that each pair plays against other pairs in a defined sequence so it is balanced and fair. We call this the movement. Online, you have a bit more flexibility because you don’t need to share physical cards: everyone can play the same hand at the same time if you like. It is still quite fiddly though, and I did not do any of this in the old Windows version. I saved some time by writing an import function to enable re-use of movements made for EBUScore, a widely used scoring and bridge session management application. There is more to do though.
Claims. This is where, half way through the hand, a player says, “There’s no point in playing on, I’m obviously going to win all the remaining tricks.” A trick is a sequence of four cards played one from each hand, which is won by one of the pairs. This statement is called a claim, and has to be agreed by the other players. Getting this working was more difficult than I had expected – because built into my bridge engine was the idea that you could score by counting the tricks each side had won. But claimed tricks are never played. With hindsight, I should have allowed for this from the beginning.
Database. Every detail of play has to be stored on the server. I am using Dapper and SQL Server currently, though it is possible that PostgreSQL would work just as well. I started with Entity Framework Core, still there as it is used by ASP.NET Core Identity, but I am happier with Dapper.
Things that worked well
Three months is longer than I had thought it would take to get to a playable system, but I suppose as a spare time project it is not too bad. It would not be possible without the likes of ASP.NET Core and Dapper and SignalR doing so much for you. C# is a delight for coding. I am also using an Azure App Service for all this test and development and that has worked well. I am deploying to a Linux container of course; but the nice thing about App Service is that it will scale to a considerable extent without the hassle of Kubernetes. If the project succeeds and needs to scale up, there is an Azure SignalR service ready and waiting. I was nevertheless interested to see that AWS now offers .NET Core on Elastic Beanstalk, complete with some nice Visual Studio integration. Trying it there would be an interesting experiment, though I’m not sure AWS is so savvy about SignalR.
Open Source?
Could this have been done quicker by making it open source and seeking collaborators early on? Will it become open source? I need help for sure, though I also feel the code needs some cleaning up before it is fit to share more widely. You will recall though that I had started out thinking that it would be a small matter to convert my solo bridge game to an online multiplayer web application. I figured it would be better to get something working and then ask for help. But I am open to offers! Note: this is not a commercial project.
Rewarding
Most of the software projects I have been involved in have been business applications. Bridge is a lot more fun. I do see software development as a creative act. I recall starting work on the bridge game back in 2011 (I think); starting a new blank project in Visual Studio and thinking, hmm, I had better write a class to represent a pack of cards. From that beginning I ended up with an application that could play bridge, after a fashion, and now one that multiple people can play concurrently. It is rewarding and I will not regret the time spent on it, irrespective of how much actual use it gets.
I like to try new technology when I can so following the Build conference I decided to deploy a Hello World app to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). I made a one-node AKS cluster in no time. I built a .NET Core app in Visual Studio deployed to a Linux Docker container, no problem. I pushed the container into ACR (Azure Container Registry) though it turns out I did not really need to do that. The tricky bit is getting the container deployed to the AKS cluster. There is a thing called Dev Spaces but it does not work in UK South:
I was contemplating the necessity of building a Helm chart when I tried a thing called Deployment Center (Preview) in the Azure portal.
Click Add Project and it builds a pipeline in Azure DevOps for you.
It worked but the pipeline failed when building the container.
COPY failed: stat /var/lib/docker/tmp/docker-builder088029891/AKS-Example/AKS-Example.csproj: no such file or directory
I spent some time puzzling over this error. You can view the exact logs of the build failure and I worked out that it is executing the Dockerfile steps:
RUN dotnet restore “AKS-Example/AKS-Example.csproj”
COPY . .
This is failing because there the code in my repository is not nested like that. I eventually fixed it by amending the lines to:
COPY [“AKS-Example.csproj”, “AKS-Example/”]
RUN dotnet restore “AKS-Example/AKS-Example.csproj”
COPY . AKS-Example/
Now the pipeline completed and the container was deployed. I had to look at the Load Balancer Azure had generated for me to find the public IP number, but it worked.
Now the Dockerfile has a different path for local development than when deployed which is annoying. I found I could fix this by changing a step in the Deployment Center wizard:
Where it says /AKS-Example in Docker build context I replaced it with /. Now the build worked with the original Dockerfile.
I also noticed that the Deployment Center (Preview) used a sample YAML template which is linked directly from GitHub and referred confusingly to deploying sampleapp. It worked but felt a bit of a crude solution.
At this point I realised that I was not really using the latest and greatest, which is the pipeline wizard in Azure Devops. So I deleted everything and tried that.
This was great but I could not see an equivalent step to the Docker build context. And indeed, the new build failed with the same COPY failed error I got originally. Luckily I knew the workaround and was up and running in no time.
This different approach also has a slightly different shape than the Deployment Center pipeline, using Environments in Azure DevOps.
Currently therefore I have two questions:
Why does Azure offer both the Deployment Center (Preview) and the multi-stage pipeline which seem to have overlapping functionality?
What is the correct way to modify the generated YAML to fix the path issue?
I suppose it would also be good if the path problem were picked up by the wizard in the first place.
