C#: Azure Government Development in Visual Studio 2017

A lot of government developers I've worked with over the past several weeks were all curious how to  implement and deploy Cloud-based solutions to Azure Government from their Visual Studio environments.  This brief tutorial goes through the steps currently required to configure Visual Studio 2017 (any version) to publish cloud services.

Step 0 - Verify Visual Studio has the Azure SDK

Before working with any Azure cloud service (Government or Commercial), Visual Studio must first have the Azure SDK installed on it.  This provides a great many pre-defined templates and class libraries that developers can use in building their solutions.  

To ensure your version has the Azure SDK installed, simply try to create a new project and look for the Cloud option under your preferred language and see that templates are displayed as shown in the following:

If you do NOT have these, click on "Open Visual Studio Installer" at the bottom of the left panel to fire it up and download the Azure SDK.

Step 1 - Install the Azure Environment Selector

Out-of-the-box today, Visual Studio expects developers to be accessing and publishing to the standard Azure Commercial or Enterprise Cloud.  Since we are going to be working in the Government cloud, we have to switch the configurations inside of Visual Studio.  Rather than do this manually every time from the command prompt or a text editor, we'll be installing the Environment Selector "extension" instead.  

From the Tools menu, select Extensions and Updates

From the Extensions window, find and download the "Azure Environment Selector" extension.

Once downloaded you will see an alert at the bottom of the window next to the Close button that alerts you this will be installed once you exit Visual Studio.  

Exit Visual Studio and you will be prompted with the Visual Studio Extension installer to modify Visual Studio.

Step 2 - Switch Environments

Upon returning to Visual Studio, you should now see a new item on the Tools menu for the Environment Selector.

Clicking on this new menu item will bring up a dialog box allowing you to change from the Commercial Cloud to the Government Cloud.  Once selected this will require a restart of Visual Studio in order to take effect.

Step 3 - Publish Cloud Projects to Azure Government

Now that Visual Studio is targeting Azure Government, open (or create a new) Cloud-Based project and from the project name in the Solution Explorer, right click and "Publish" your service.

Visual Studio will take you to a Publishing wizard that allows you to publish a new service or replace an existing one.  

Before you can complete the publishing process, you will need to login to Azure Government with your credentials (shown in the top right of the screen as shown here:

C#: Sharing a Visual Studio Pro 2017 Project on GitHub

This article will go through and provide a step-by-step guide on how to post a Visual Studio 2017 Project and Solution to a newly established GitHub Repository (repo).  As with many tools, there are a multitude of paths to take and different ways to accomplish a task like this.  This just provides one possible path to accomplish this task.

Step 1 - Add GitHub Tools to Visual Studio

Before we can use GitHub from within Visual Studio 2017, we need to install the plug-in to make it easier to manage.  You can of course just use Git from the command line as well. . . .this article instead looks at the GUI though.
From the Tools menu, navigate to Extensions and Updates.

Once the Extensions and Updates window opens up, navigate to the "Online" item and search for "GitHub".  The "GitHub Extension for Visual Studio" (the one with the official GitHub icon) is the extension you're looking for.  Find it and Install it.  

Step 2 - Configure the Team Explorer

For this next step, I'll assume you have the Professional or Enterprise edition installed with Team Explorer functionality.  Navigate to the Team Explorer if you don't already see it on your screen by going to View >> Team Explorer.

In the Team Explorer window, click on the plug-shaped connections icon to add a new connection to GitHub.

From here, we need to login to GitHub with your GitHub account (just go sign-up for a new account if you don't have one yet). 

Step 3 - Create a New GitHub Repo

Now that you've connected GitHub to your Visual Studio environment, you should see your existing GitHub repos listed in the Team Explorer Connect screen.  For this tutorial, we'll create a new repo for a new project by clicking on the "Create" link and entering some details about the repo in the accompanying pop-up window.

WARNING: you will not be able to mark the repo as "Private Repository" unless you have a paid GitHub Account.  Free accounts are only available publicly for all to see.  Again, just to reiterate. . . .the new repo you create will, by default, be PUBLIC and available for ANYONE to see.

Assuming your create request was successful, you will see a resulting success alert in the Team Services window.

Step 4 - Create a New Solution & Project In the Repo

Now that we have a repo, we can navigate back to the Team Explorer Tab and select our newly created repo to make it active in our work-space.

Once selected, the "Home" subtab inside of the Team Explorer should open and present you with a list of actions you can take with the repo.  Initially, we see that no project has been created or associated with this repo, so we will choose the "New.." link under Solutions.

This will bring up the familiar New Project wizard to allow you to pick your project type and name your project.  For this demo, we will just create a sample web project.

Once created, we can navigate back to the Solution Explorer and see our project exists and source code control icons exist next to each file to denote the status of each file under source control.  By default, Visual Studio includes all relevate source code files but one can add items to be excluded (e.g. add them to the .gitignore) pretty easily later on the commit page.

You should also note, that the toolbar at the bottom of the Visual Studio window now shows a number of Git-related icons that can be interacted with to view edits, make a pull request and select the active branch you are working in at the moment.

Step 5 - Commit Your Work Locally

Git, as an open standard, allows users to work locally on their machines with a copy of the source code in a local repo, and then when satisfied the code is correct, it allows you to commit your changes locally first, then eventually (and separately) commit your code externally to your server or cloud provider.
The first part is committing our work to our local repo hosted on our machine.
In order to do this, we simply click on the pencil icon in the toolbar, or choose "Changes" from the Team Explorer.

Step 6 - Commit Your Code to Cloud

Now that the code has been committed locally, it's time to commit our changes to the GitHub servers.  In order to active this process, we simply choose "Sync" from the Project Explorer to allow Git to see if anyone has already made changes on the server that need to be resolved on our client before posting our changes.  

Once Git has done its job and you have addressed any conflicts, the changes can be "Pushed" to the cloud from the Sync page.

If the push was completed successfully, a warning appears on the Team Explorer like so:

And you can navigate to https://www.github.com/ to see that your project is now accessible in the new Git Repo you created.