ASP.NET Core Environments & Deployment Azure DevOps CI/CD

Create an ASP.NET Core MVC web app in Visual Studio using the Model-View-Controller template on .NET 8 with HTTPS, and customize the layout to display a header and three articles.

Set up and manage ASP.NET Core launch profiles in Visual Studio, creating development, staging, and production environments, and display the active environment using configuration and environment variables.

Create an app settings file for each profile (development, staging, production) and use the ASP.NET Core environment variable to load the appropriate appsettings.[environment].json, including the development database connection.

Create environment-specific appsettings files for development, staging, and production, remove defaults, and configure the app to share common settings while reading environment-specific connection strings via view bags.

Learn how to override the subtitle property in appsettings.json for different environments using environment-specific json files (development, staging, production) and expose a custom environment variable in views.

Clean up the project by removing custom environment variables, subtitle overrides, and connection string displays, then install Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore and Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer to enable Entity Framework Core in the project.

Install the EF Core Power Tools extension in Visual Studio to simplify reverse engineering and speed up DbContext creation.

Create separate sql server databases for development, staging, and production and populate the article table with environment-specific data using prepared scripts; switch databases and verify results.

Use EF Core Power Tools to connect a web app to a SQL Server database by reverse engineering the article table into a blog db context and models.

Configure environment-specific appsettings files with connection strings for development, staging, and production; implement an article service using entity framework and dependency injection, then render environment-specific data in views.

Create Azure web app services for development, staging, and production in one resource group, using dotnet eight on Windows in East US, with a free plan and no ci/cd.

Create development, staging, and production Azure SQL databases in the blog web resource group with a single server and serverless, general-purpose, budget-friendly compute.

Publish a web app to Azure App Service. Configure development, staging, and production environments, update app settings with Azure SQL connections, and set the ASP.NET Core environment variable.

Explore how to inspect what you deployed to Azure via the kudu environment, view appsettings and DLLs, and manage deployments across development, staging, and production.

Set up Azure CI/CD pipelines for development, staging, and production, automate builds with .NET Core, and publish to Azure App Service using release pipelines, artifacts, and continuous deployment triggers.

Override the appsettings production and staging connection strings using Azure DevOps variables, demonstrating json variable substitution and deployment steps for production and staging environments.

Secure the connection string by storing it in Azure Key Vault and linking the secret to Azure DevOps variable groups for staging and production, enabling safe retrieval by your apps.

Configure Azure DevOps branch policies and pull requests, enforce reviewers and build validation, manage merge types, and safeguard staging and master branches.

Set up and deploy ASP.NET web applications across multiple environments with Azure DevOps CI/CD. Create and configure Azure cloud services as part of the deployment process, and continue learning.