The Top 5 DevOps Automation Tools .NET Developers Should Know

1. The Top 5 DevOps Automation Tools.NET Developers Should Know www.visualpath.in

2. Not too long ago, deployments were done by hand - manually pushed to a physical server somewhere in a building your company owned. The software engineering world has come a long way since then, and we have more options than ever get our code and data live, automatically. Here are a few tools every C#/.NET developer should know that can help with that process, vetted by some of the best software leaders in the business. Be sure to check each one out if you aren’t already using their awesome power. • Code Deployment + CI/CD Pipeline Automation • Here you’ll find a few excellent tools to assist with deploying your code, and getting it integrated with your repository, to read any commits you have done and automatically push the changes.

3. 1. Azure DevOps • The latest option from Microsoft is the fully integrated Azure DevOps offering, Azure Pipelines. Lots of team options to use here, and it plugs in nicely to existing projects. Azure Pipelines works pretty seamlessly with containerization like Kubernetes, Azure Functions for a serverless option, quick-deployed Azure Web Apps and more complex VMs. It is the all-in-one option to make a .NET developer’s life streamlined. Azure DevOps Services allows you one free CI/CD target using an Azure Repo or GitHub repo, and pricing scales from there depending on how many pipelines or user licenses you need. • 2. Jenkins • Jenkins is the most popular open-source CI/CD tool currently available, supporting many programming languages and applications. With it’s MSBuildplugin, using Jenkins as your build server is one of the easiest things I’ve ever personally used for deployment orchestration. It’s easy to see when the build triggered deployments fail and will run any scripts you need. When working on a project with many moving pieces in different ecosystems, Jenkins is an easy-to-understand way to tie them all together. It plays nice with everything, from hosts like Azure and AWS to repositories like Bitbucket and GitHub. Best of all - it’s FREE. • 3. Octopus Deploy • Octopus Deploy is a finely-tuned orchestrator for your pipeline. It works in tandem with your build server, taking care of deploying and promoting releases between environments. www.visualpath.in

4. 4. Redgate SQL Toolbelt • With some of the best headache-reducing products on the market for SQL databases, Redgate has created tools that assist developers with data scenarios that come up during software projects. I have personally reduced my SQL database troubleshooting down to a matter of hours instead of days by using their suite of products. The options below allow you get back to your code quicker with the helpfulness of database automation and analysis tooling. Redgate’s products work with PowerShell, and have add-on extensions for Visual Studio and VS Code. • SQL Change Automation • This is the tool that gets your database scheduled updates live, quickly, without manually pushing. • SQL Compare • For the times where you need to update the database schema itself, running it through this comparison tool helps. It allows you to generate a database change script, not unlike the options in Entity Framework - for any SQL database, local or cloud-hosted. Then it deploys the changes automatically. • SQL Data Compare • Many configurations are stored in a database, and this tool examines the data values of any SQL instance with another one. It has saved a breaking data change more than once in my career, and something that is absolutely worth the money to have around. www.visualpath.in

5. Code Analysis: Gated Deployment Automation • While we are at it, why not ensure that the code you deploy fits within your team’s standards? There are ways to run automatic analysis within your local IDE, yes. Tools like the ones below will gate the commit itself, and allow fixes before a pull request is even created. • 5. SonarSource • It can be difficult to quantify what “good” or “bad” code can be on a team project, so SonarSource developed a suite of products that allows you to set the rules of what your team’s code should look like. SonarCube is the one I used first, which can be run on a self-hosted server for code quality analysis and provides a score of risk for the existing repository. The next level of action was to gate the ability for a developer to merge their pull request if it does not meet the code rules you set up. Locally, you can use SonarLint to run against MSBuild in your Visual Studio instance. In conjunction with your CI/CD pipeline, cloud-hosted SonarCloud can run as a trigger for code quality before allowing your build to compile. • SonarC#  • This is SonarSource’s C# specific analyzer and works with Roslyn to create custom rule sets for your team project, including automating running tests. Prices vary depending on which of their tools you choose to use, but it is completely worth it. If you are looking for a quick way to level-up your developers and ensure code quality is always present, this is a great option. SonarC# lets your focus code reviews on important topics and eliminates the low-hanging fruit. www.visualpath.in

6. DevOps Automation is a Key Skill for All .NET Developers • These are just 5 of the top tools that many successful ASP.NET and .NET Core developers use to manage the growing needs for shipping code faster and more accurately. Now more than ever, developers should add DevOps experience to their resume, as it will become a natural requirement for jobs in the not-too-distant future. www.visualpath.in

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