In this chapter, we'll cover the following:
In previous chapters, you learned how to create Azure Functions right from the Azure Management portal. Here are a few of the features that we encountered:
Despite the advantages provided by the Azure Management portal, moving over from a familiar integrated development environment (IDE) to something new can prove to be a daunting task for developers. To ease this transition, the Microsoft team has come up with a few tools that help developers to integrate Azure Functions into Visual Studio, with the aim of leveraging critical IDE features that are imperative for accelerating development efforts. Here are a few of the features:
In this recipe, you will learn how to create an Azure function in Visual Studio 2019 with the latest available Azure Functions runtime. You'll also discover how to provide access to anonymous users.
You'll need to download and install the following tools and software:
In this section, you'll create a function application and a HTTP function using Visual Studio by performing the following steps:
Once the basic setup of your Function creation is complete, the next step is to start working on developing the application as per your needs. Developers end up facing numerous technical issues that require tools to identify the root cause of the problem and fix it. These tools include debugging tools that help developers to step into each line of the code to view the values of the variables and objects and get a detailed view of the exceptions.
Download and install the Azure CLI (if these tools are not installed, Visual Studio will automatically download them when you run your functions from Visual Studio).
In this section, you'll learn how to configure and debug an Azure function in a local development environment within Visual Studio.
Perform the following steps:
In both of the previous recipes, you learned how to create and execute Azure Functions in a local environment. You triggered the functions from a local browser. However, in this recipe, you'll learn how to trigger an Azure function in your local environment when an event occurs in Azure. For example, when a new blob is created in an Azure storage account, we can have our function triggered on our local machine. This helps developers to test their applications upfront, before deploying them to the production environment.
Perform the following steps:
cookbookfiles, in Azure.In this section, you'll learn how to create a blob trigger that will trigger as soon as a blob is created in the storage account.
Perform the following steps...
So far, your function application is just a regular application within Visual Studio. To deploy the function application along with its functions, you need to either create the following new resources, or select existing ones to host the new function application:
You can provide all these details directly from Visual Studio without opening the Azure Management portal. You'll learn how to do that in this recipe.
In this section, you'll learn how to deploy Azure Functions to Azure.
Perform the following steps:
In one of the previous recipes, Connecting to the Azure Storage from Visual Studio, you learned how to connect a storage account from the local code. In this recipe, you'll learn how to debug the live code running in the Azure cloud environment. You'll perform the following steps in the BlobTriggerCSharp function of the FunctionAppinVisualStudio function application:
Create a container named cookbookfiles-live in the storage account. You'll be uploading a blob to this container.
You have now seen some of the major use cases for Azure Functions—in short, when developing a piece of code and deploying it in a serverless environment, where a developer or administrator doesn't need to worry about the provisioning and scaling of instances to host server-side applications.
You can take advantage of all the features of serverless (for example, autoscaling) only when you create your function application by choosing the Consumption plan in the Hosting Plan drop-down menu.
By looking at the title of this recipe, you might already be wondering why and how deploying an Azure function to a Docker container will help. Yes, the combination of Azure Functions and Docker containers might not make sense, as we would lose all the serverless benefits (for example, autoscaling) of Azure Functions if we deployed to Docker.
However, there may be some customers whose existing workloads might be in a cloud (be it...
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