On my work computer, I have VS2017 and VS2017 preview installed. Recently both stopped being able to discover MSTest unit tests, and Resharper also did not discover tests until I opened a file containing some tests.
There was nothing in the Visual Studio log windows that indicated problems, and it proved to be an issue whose cause was hard to find.
In this part of the series I will look at using a WCF IParameterInspector implementation to time the actual WCF service operation and send the tracking metrics to Azure Application Insights.
The previous parts of this blog series have discussed adding the necessary NuGet packages to the Visual Studio project, so the Application Insights parts work, how to create a Telemetry Initializer to add information to each Application Insights tracking event, and how to use a WCF IDispatchMessageInspector to get information about each request to the WCF service.
In the first part of this series I wrote about what Azure Application Insights (AI) can do and how to add extra information to the tracking telemetry your application sends to AI.
The solution that I wanted to add AI tracking to was a Windows Service with self-hosted WCF services. One service is the server side of a SOAP service where the caller defined the SOAP WSDL, and the other WCF service is a single method that receives raw XML as a http POST message. To track each request to the WCF service, I decided to use a message inspector.
Application Insights is a service in Microsoft Azure for Application Performance Monitoring. See more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/ .
I’ve previously (1, 2, 3) posted about Application Insights when it was part of Visual Studio Online. It has been moved to the Azure portal, and now has a slightly different API.
It can be used to detect crashes, tracks performance issues and usage of mobile apps, web apps and more.
I’ve used it on a few web sites hosted in IIS or on Azure, and it works great.
For ASP.net web sites, it’s really easy to set up and get going. There the VS2015 integration to it makes it really seamless, and if you can follow a few wizard steps, there is no additional setup needed.
However, if you don’t have a mobile app, an ASP.net site on Azure or local IIS or a J2EE application, then there are no wizards, and no easy setup.
I have an Azure Cloud service which consists of web and worker roles. To make it quicker to update the cloud service whenever I’ve made changes to it, I want to deploy it from Visual Studio Online.
I already use VSO for source control for this project, and I have previously used the XAML based build process in VSO. Since I was going to move the project from one Azure account to another (from my play/test account to the business account), I decided to change the build process.
Visual Studio Online (VSO) has a new build system that will eventually replace the old XAML based system.
VSO now also lets you perform builds using an on-prem build agent (or one hosted in a VM on Azure etc.).
I haven not been able to find information about this, but I assume that using on-prem agents will not count against the VSO build minutes. I assume that running builds are “free” contrary to using hosted agents, where there are 60 minutes included in VSO, and then you have to pay for additional.
To avoid having the same Nuget packages in a development project, when the project consists of multiple Visual Studio solutions (.sln files), it is possible to configure Nuget to use a shared repository.
This is done by changing the default packages path to something else.
For existing solutions and projects depending on packages in the default path, the hintpath in the C# projects files (.csproj) needs to be changed to point to the new packages folder.
In my last blog post, I talked about installing the Visual Studio Application Insights monitoring agent.
That’s all very nice. But you don’t actually gain much by just installing the agent. You need to tell it what to monitor. This post describes how to do that.
If you have web applications running in IIS, and you want to monitor their performance, you are pretty much all set by simply installing the monitoring agent, and adding a single config file to your project. The config file ApplicationInsights.config lets the monitoring agent know that you want this web application monitored, and it allows you to configure some settings about what you want monitored.
Visual Studio Online has a relatively new feature called Application Insights. It’s currently in preview, but it already has lots of nice features for gaining insights into what is going on with your web app (or Windows Phone app or Azure web site).
I’m planning to do a few blog posts on this subject. This first part is about installing the monitoring agent and getting the first Application Insights information from my apps to the Application Insights portal.
In my current main project, we have a lot of WCF services hosted with my company’s hosting branch. We don’t have a lot of information about the service health and their use, other than what monitoring services we have built ourselves. Since that is not our main business, we decided to use a third-party service to monitor those things.
We have evaluated a few options, and decided to go further with VS Application Insights, as it seemed to be enough for our needs – and while we evaluate, its free. I guess it will come at a cost when it gets out of preview.