Download Offline Installer for VS 2017

There is no ISO available to download for VS2017. You can view why Microsoft did not make ISO available, is discussed in here. However if you want to download VS 2017 to perform an offline installation you can follow the steps described below.

• Download the relevant VS installation .exe (for example vs_enterprise__984310617.1489458965.exe).
• Copy it to your local hard drive folder let’s say E:\Install
• Create a folder to download installation files say E:\Install\VS2017 (can be in a different path such as D:\VS2017)
• Open command prompt as administrator and change the directory to where your downloaded .exe is available
• Execute the command below

Auto Generating CD Build/Release Pipeline Targeting Azure App Service for MVC Web Application

VSTS allows great flexibility with it’s new web based build and release management features. You have several templates which can be used to create build and release definitions you need quickly. Lots of out of the box tasks allow you to further customize your definitions to support the steps that you need to perform during a build or a deployment. Visual Studio Marketplace is getting more and more components added to it, allowing you to find a task for almost any build deploy step you may require to perform. Taking the steps to the next level, you can now even generate your build/release pipeline with Visual Studio 2017, after adding the extension Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio.

Let’s walkthrough the steps of generating a CD pipeline for an MVC Web Application, to allow it to be deployed to Azure App Service.

Building ASP.NET Core 1.1 Web App with Team Services

ASP.NET Core 1.1 is available with Visual Studio 2017 and it is based on .csproj to provide us with a consistent experience inside Visual Studio. .csproj will be the way forward with ASP.NET Core and Microsoft encourages everyone developing on ASP.NET Core to move to Visual Studio 2017. You can see the recommendation in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/03/07/announcing-net-core-tools-1-0/ quoted below. Microsoft will not be updating VS 2015 based tools for .NET core anymore.