#VS2017 – Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 released: .Net Core 2.0, #AzureFunctions and more

Hello !

Now that we only have a version of Visual Studio 2017, every time an update of the big ones appears, it’s time to slow down and see what new features are there. In the case of Visual Studio 2017 15.3, IMHO the 2 biggest new features are

.Net Core 2.0, I suppose I will have to organize a theme update with JuanLu for another episode of the podcast (link)
Azure Functions, which are the subject that I will write about today and about what we talked about a while ago in the podcast with David and Pedro (link)

The idea and implementation of Azure Functions is something really really cool. Surely I will find a Hater and he will tells me that “this is not 100% Serverless, someone is keeping the server somewhere“, but I take this type of comments and put them in places where I rarely get some sun.

I very much value having the possibility of creating an operation and just devoting time to programming the business logic and to deploy it. That saves me time, a lot of time that I do not have to dedicate in creating a project to support the infrastructure of it.

Note: the animation is from the original post on Visual Studio 2017 15.3.

Well, until today we could use Azure Functions by programming them directly in the web editor from Azure or with an extension for VS2017. Using Visual Studio 2017 to create Azure Functions gave us some advantages such as the ability to debug them locally, add NuGet packages, create unit tests, deploy to Azure from the IDE, and more.

I have hit a surprise of good, when after updating to VS217 15.3, I found that the IDE did not recognize me more this type of projects. It turns out that now that Azure Functions are part of the Visual Studio 2017 core, so you have to install the Azure Development Workload, to have them. SO it was time to launch our beloved Visual Studio 2017 Installer