August 2018 Summaries

The blog post by Shannon Lewis provides a detailed guide on setting up a build pipeline for .NET Core applications using various tools, including TeamCity, VSTS (now Azure DevOps), and Cake scripts. It emphasizes the importance of adapting to the .NET Core ecosystem by avoiding older frameworks like OctoPack and instead utilizing Microsoft's current tooling for publishing, packaging, and deploying applications. The process involves three main steps: publishing the application, packaging it, and pushing it to a feed that Octopus Deploy can use. The author offers specific examples for each tool, sharing insights on configuring build steps, managing versioning, and troubleshooting potential issues such as package version mismatches. The post also highlights the flexibility of Cake scripts, which allows for local testing and tool-agnostic builds, and addresses the installation requirements of the Octopus .NET CLI extension. Overall, the article aims to provide a comprehensive resource for developers seeking efficient and reliable build processes for their .NET Core projects.

Michael Compton's post from August 17, 2018, delves into the use of Workers within the Octopus Deploy system to enhance deployment performance by offloading tasks from the Octopus Server to external machines. This distribution is recommended for improving security, performance, and resource management during deployments. Through various examples, including simple scripts, S3 file uploads, and Azure Web App deployments, Compton illustrates how shifting CPU, disk, and network loads to Workers can alleviate server strain and potentially speed up deployment processes. He emphasizes that while the examples are simplified, the principles apply broadly, allowing users to optimize their deployment setups by strategically using Workers. The post underscores the flexibility and options Workers provide for deployment configuration, encouraging users to consider their infrastructure and workload distribution to achieve more efficient and robust system performance.

The text discusses the introduction of "dotnet octo," a global tool that allows the Octopus CLI, formerly known as octo.exe, to be used conveniently across platforms that support only .NET Core, such as Linux and Mac OS. This enhancement addresses the demand for building .NET Core applications on machines without the full .NET framework, providing a more seamless integration into the .NET Core ecosystem. The tool can be installed locally or globally, with the local installation offering better isolation, albeit with some configuration requirements. The update facilitates the execution of commands like creating packages and releases directly through the dotnet interface, and it integrates with build servers like TeamCity and VSTS, which are now updated to support the new tool. Although OctoPack is not ported to this new environment due to changes in NuGet and MSBuild mechanics, dotnet octo offers an efficient alternative for packaging applications, with plans to enhance its capability to push packages to various services beyond the Octopus built-in feed. The text concludes by encouraging developers to try out the new tool and provide feedback, signifying an ongoing evolution within the .NET Core landscape.