Deploy ASP.NET Core App to AKS with Azure DevOps

When start a new application development, we have to invest on initial effort in creating required project structure,configure CI/CD pipelines etc. to facilitate the successful application development.In a situation where you target Azure Kubernetes Services as deployment target of your application you can use Azure DevOps project to do the initial setup within few minutes.
This post will explain how create a new DevOps project with full CI/CD pipeline to get ASP.NET core application deployed to AKS.Let’s look at steps in detail.

Fixing “The subscription is not registered to use namespace” when deploying Azure Resources

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) allow you to run your containerized application without you having to worry about setting up your own infrastructure. It is robust cloud service offering coming with Microsoft Azure for using Kubernetes as a service. Azure DevOps is helping us achieving implementation of CI/CD pipelines for deploying containerized applications to Azure Kubernetes Services. You can use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy an AKS cluster in Azure. However, when deploying a AKS cluster using Azure DevOps, deployment may fail with the error message “The subscription is not registered to use namespace”. Let’s look at the reasons behind this error and how to get it fixed.

Setup Windows 10 VM in Azure to Develop with Docker CE

Docker is a tool which facilitate to create,deploy and run applications by using containers.Container is used to package up  an application with all of the parts it needs and ship it all as one package.This post would explain you how to setup Docker CE in Azure VM to use it for developing Docker based applications.

• Create a azure VM by selecting windows client machine.Select Windows 10 professional or enterprise version.Select V3 category size when create a VM.As example D3_V3.I use Windows 10 Pro,Version 1803 VM with D3_V3 size to do this demo.

MAQS Faker Data Utility

We have discussed about MAQS open framework in two of the previous posts. How to setup Visual Studio to work with MAQS open framework is described in the first post (Functional Test Automation with MAQS Open Framework) and in the second post a sample test automation code is described(Start Test Automation with MAQS Open Framework). In this post, let’s identify simple but useful utility available in MAQS open framework.

Start Test Automation with MAQS Open Framework

We have discussed how to setup Visual Studio to work with MAQS (https://github.com/Magenic/MAQS) open framework in a previous post.(Functional Test Automation with MAQS Open Framework).Within this post let’s write a simple test using the MAQS.
First Create a MAQS project as described in previous post.You know one of the main advantages of MAQS framework is we do not need to spend time, to do package installation and configurations.After creating a project, you can find all required drivers and other packages are installed.You will only have to change configuration values according to your project requirements before start scripting.There would be an App.config file under Test project once the project is created for this purpose.
Page Object Model is used in the project created with MAQS.Page Object Model is an object design pattern where web pages are represented as classes. The elements of the page are represented as variables in the class.

Functional Test Automation with MAQS Open Framework

MAQS open framework help you to quickly setup test automation project and start automation scripting.This post will explain you how to setup visual studio to work with MAQS open framework.

Let’s install latest version of MAQS open framework(version 5.1.0).As pre requirements you need to install .Net Framework version 4.7.1 or above and Visual studio2015 or above.There are two ways to install MAQS open framework. Install via VS or Marketplace.This post will explain you how to install MAQS via Visual Studio.

Create Azure VM using ARM Template

We have explored how to create an Azure Virtual Machine using the Azure portal and understood how to get started with Azure PowerShell in previous two posts. As third step of the series this post we can learn how to create Azure Virtual Machine using ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template. The Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the service used to provision resources in Azure subscription

1. To create your first ARM template, go to the Azure portal as we have discussed in Create Azure Virtual Machine post.and follow the steps to create a VM (Virtual Machine) till the final step..
2. In the final step you can find a link next to Create button named “Download template and parameters”. Click on that link to download template files.

Install Azure PowerShell and Execute Commands

Cloud computing is very trending technology in today IT industry.Among all these cloud computing services azure is one of the most used cloud computing service. If you have experience with azure may have created azure VM s for various project requirements. Most of the azure users know how to create azure VM using azure portal but most of them haven't tried to create azure VM using ARM templates.You can refer my post Create Azure Virtual Machine which explain how to create azure VM using azure portal.This post will present you setting up azure PowerShell before start working with ARM template.Within this article you will learn how to install azure PowerShell and execute few PowerShell commands.

Working with Azure PowerShell

Azure is one of the most popular cloud computing service that use for building,testing,deploying and managing applications.When we work with azure we all familiar how to perform different tasks using azure portal.But we can do the same tasks using simple PowerShell commands with Azure PowerShell.

Scheduled Azure WebJobs Trigger Through C# Script

While you work with C# may get requirement to trigger a azure web job that is scheduled in azure which is displayed as triggered using your C# code.
Following steps show you how to trigger a web job using Web Job API.

1. First we need to find site credentials(publish profile credentials).You can find site credentials by following Option 1 or Option 2.

UI Automation with Selenium using jQuery.simulate Plugin

While you are working with selenium for automation testing, you may have experienced that some web controls do not  respond well to selenium commands.Selenium drag and drop functions are such commands which do not work as expected.As solution we can automate drag and drop function using jQuery.simulate plugin.Following steps explain you how to use jQuery.simulate plugin and execute simple drag and drop code.

Functional Testing using Selenium and PhantomJS with Python

You may have a project requirement to improve performance of a test automation script within a short time period.It is not a good practice to go for a big code change at this kind of situation.To do that, one option is use headless browser instead of your ordinary web browser.Headless browser is a browser which doesn’t have GUI.When do headless browser testing we don’t see any GUI but program runs in background.because of that no need to wait until browser opens and load the web content to perform actions on web elements.Therefore you can save lot of test execution time.
PhantomJs is one of the widely used headless driver.This helps to run a bunch of test cases  without ever having to open a web browser.You can take screen shots of each step while test case is executing even though user doesn’t see the GUI

Create Azure Virtual Machine

While you do testing may execute automated test cases only in visual studio. You may have decided to execute automated functional tests using a test agent and test controller and planning to deploy VMs to do this. But without using on premises machines you can deploy Azure VMs to setup test agents and controller.

But why Azure VMs?

It is hard to predict how your business change. There may be situations you have to improve performance of your automation scripts by increasing resources of agent machines. Or you may need to do parallel test execution using multiple agent machines.

• Due to Scalability and High availability of Azure VMs you can change resources of VMs easily according to your project requirements.
• You can deploy new AVM less than 15 minutes.

Obtaining Results While Test Execution with VSTS Release Management

When you are executing automated functional testing, there could be failures in critical test cases. In such situations, it may be worthless to continue test execution further. However, when you run automated functional test cases thorough VSTS/ TFS, until the full test execution finishes, you would not be able to view the individual test case status. This is a feature considered by Microsoft for VSTS in 2018 Q2 (for on premises TFS 2019) and until that shows up here is small workaround.

Using Sikuli & Selenium in VS to Detect the Undetectable

While doing GUI automation, We can identify few limitations of the selenium web driver.

• Selenium web driver does not support flash objects.
• Selenium web driver automate only web applications.

Other than these web driver limitations,some times you may have to write automation scripts, while you do not have easy access to GUI’s internal code.

Functional Testing with Selenium and Python

The visual studio IDE can be used to do the python+selenium script writing. The best thing is, If you use unittest module, Test case is displayed on the test explorer. Which allows to run a test case using test explorer.