What is Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure is the latest technology in web hosting in web development and people don’t forget it’s not only about web hosting. A lot of features are coming with the package such as Azure cosmos DB, Load Balancing, Web services, Performance monitoring and Cost Management of the account you have purchased. Microsoft Azure has been around for a few years now and you’ve probably heard of it. It’s the Microsoft cloud platform that competes directly with Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Google’s Google Cloud. If you don’t really know what “the cloud” is, I suggest you really look into it as I believe it’s the future. It’s free and you only need a credit card and a Microsoft email account like Hotmail or Outlook. Beware, Azure is free for now. You get free credit which is valid for one month. Some services cost a monthly fee, for others, you pay per use. Just having an empty Azure account is always free. In this post, we’re going to host a default web application in Azure using an App Service.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) VSTS is Microsoft’s cloud version of Team Foundation Service (TFS), which is their tool for continuous integration and deployment, development, measurement, source control, and Agile tools like SCRUM and Kanban boards. And also it VSTS is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio Architecture that allows it to encompass developers and/or development teams. Visual Studio is a software development environment built on the .NET framework that is designed for managing projects and development work in the variety of languages including Visual C# .NET, Visual C++.NET, Visual Basic .NET, Visual J# .NET and ASP.NET. Just like with Azure, it’s free and you need a Microsoft email address, like Hotmail or Outlook. For the free version of VSTS, you get quite a bit of functionality, like 240 free build minutes per month and unlimited free private Git repositories. With an MSDN subscription, you get some extra functionality, but the free tier is good enough for this post.
ASP.NET Core For the last few years, Microsoft has focused on .NET Core, an open source multi-platform subset of the .NET Framework. While it still has some issues, even in the latest .NET Core 2.1 release. It’s a bit different than the full .NET Framework, but not a lot. You may have to download and install the latest SDK, which can all be found on the .NET Core GitHub page. Visual Studio support for .NET Core starts from Visual Studio 2017, so be sure you’re up to date, otherwise you can probably follow along with a regular .NET Framework ASP.NET Web Application.