Sitecore TDS allows developers to serialize Sitecore items into a file format which enables them to be stored in source control. These items can then be turned into a Sitecore update package to be deployed into a Sitecore solution.

With tools like Team City it was possible to install the TDS application on the server, and MSBuild would pick it up in the same way that Visual Studio would when you create a build locally. However, with build tools like Azure Piplelines that are a SAAS service you do not have any access to install components on a server.

If your solution contains a TDS project and you run an Azure Pipeline, you will probably see this error saying that the target 'Build' does not exist in the project.

Fortunately, TDS can be added to a project as a NuGet package. The documentation I found on Hedgehogs site for TDS says the package is unlisted on NuGet.org but can be installed in the normal way if you know what it's called. When I tried this is didn't work, but the NuGet package is also available in the TDS download so we can do it a different way.

Firstly download TDS from Hedgehogs website. https://www.teamdevelopmentforsitecore.com/Download/TDS-Classic

Next create a folder in the root of your drive called LocalNuGet and copy the nuget package from the download into this folder.

Within Visual Studio go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Settings, and in the window that opens select Package Sources on the left.

Add a new package source and set it to your LocalNuGet folder.

From the package manager screen select your local nuget server as the package source and then add the TDS package to the relevant projects.

When you commit to source control make sure you add the hedgehog package in your projects packages folder. Normally this will be excluded as your build will try and restore the NuGet packages from a NuGet feed rather than containing them in the repo.

If you run your Azure Pipleine now you should get the following error:

This is a great first step as we can now see TDS is being used and we're getting an error from it.

If you're not getting this, then open the csproj file for your solution and check that there are no references to c:\program files (x86)\Hedgehog Development\ you should have something like this:

To fix the product key error we need to add our license details.

Edit your pipeline and then click on the variables button in the top right. Add two new variables:

• TDS_Key - Which should be set to your license key
• TDS_Owner - Which should be set to the company name the key is linked to

Now run your pipleline again and the build should succeed

The other day someone told me .net was slow to get something built, and to be fair to the person I can see why he would have thought that. Most of his interaction with .net projects have been on complex with large enterprise applications that often have integrated multiple other applications.

However, I would maintain that .net is a framework that is actually really fast to develop on and that what he had perceived as being slow was the complexities of a project rather than the actual coding time.

In fact, I would say it's so fast to get something built in it, it actually becomes the fastest thing to develop a prototype in. Here are my top reasons why.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core inherits all the best bits from the ASP.NET Framework that came before it, giving the framework almost 20 years of refinement since its original release in 2002. The days of WebForms in the original ASP.NET are now long behind us and we now have the choice of building web applications with either MVC or Razor Pages.

Razor provides the perfect combination of a view language providing helpers to render your html without limiting what can be done on the front end. How you code your HTML is still completely up to you, the helpers just provide features like binding that make it even faster to do.

Another great thing about .Net core over that which came before it, is its platform independent. Rather than being confined to just Windows, you can run it on Mac or Linux too.

Great starter templates

What kicks of a great prototype project is starting with great templates, and ASP.NET Core has a bunch.

As already mentioned, you can build a Web Application with either Razor Pages or MVC, but the templates also provide you with the base for building an API, Angular App, React.js or React.js and Redux or you can simply create an Empty application.

My preference is to go for MVC as it's what I'm the most familiar with and a key thing for rapidly building a prototype is that you develop rapidly. The idea is to focus on creating something new and unique, not learn how to develop in a new framework.

The MVC Web Application gives you a base site to work with a few pages already set up, bootstrap and jQuery are already included so you start right at the point of working on your logic rather than spending time doing setup.

SQL Server and EF Core

I've always been a bit of a database guy. I'm not sure why, but its a topic that has always just made sense to me, and despite being a topic that can get quite complex, the reasons behind it being complex always feel logical.

When it comes to building a prototype though there are two aspects which make storage with .net core super simple.

Firstly, Entity Framework Core (EF Core) means you don't really need to know any SQL or spend any time writing it. It helps if you do, but at a minimum all you need to be doing is creating a model in your code, adding a few lines for a DB context that tells EF.Core that a model is a table and how they relate. Then turn on migrations and you're done. When you run the application, the DB gets created for you and each time you change your model, you just add another migration and the next time the application runs the application the DB schema gets updated.

Querying your DB is done by writing LINQ queries against your entity framework model, allowing you to have next to no understanding of SQL and how the DB works. Everything is just done by magic for you.

The second part is SQL Server and its different versions. Often when you think of SQL Server you think of the big DB engine with its many many components that you install on a server or your local machine but there's two others which are even more important. LocalDB and Azure SQL.

LocalDB is an option that can be installed as part of Visual Studio. No separate application is needed or services to be running in the background. It is essentially the minimum required to start the DB engine to be used for development purposes. In practical terms this means when you start your application EF.Core can run off a LocalDB which didn't require any setup, but as far as your application in concerned it is no different than working with any other version of SQL Server.

Azure SQL as the name implies is SQL Server on Azure. The only thing I really need to say about this is that you can swap LocalDB and Azure SQL with ease. They may be different but as far as your prototype is concerned, they are the same.

Scaffolding

The only thing quicker than writing code is having someone else do it for you. So we've created our application from a template, added a model which generated our database and now its time to create some pages. Well the good news is it's still not time to write much code because Visual Studio can scaffold out pages based on our model for us!

Adding a controller to our project in Visual Studio gives us some options on what should be generated for us, one of which is MVC Controller with views, using Entity Framework. What that means is given a model it will create controllers and views for listing items, creating them, editing them and deleting them. No coding by us required!

Now it's unlikely that is exactly what you're after, but it's generally a good starting place and deleting code you don't need is far quicker then writing it.

Azure

Lastly there is Azure. You may have spotted a theme to all these points and that is they all remove any effort required to do any setup and instead focus on building your own logic, and this point is no different.

I remember a time, when if I wanted a server to put an application on, I had to request it, and then wait a while. What I would get back would either be a server that already had resources running on it, or a blank server that would need applications installed on it. e.g. SQL Server or .Net Framework. IIS wouldn't have been configured and it would be a number of hours before my application would be running.

With Azure you don't even really need to leave Visual Studio. From the publish dialog box you can create a new App Service and DB, and then publish. All the connection strings are sorted out for you. There are service plans which cost next to nothing, a domain is configured for you and at the end of the publish the website opens and is working. The whole process has taken less than 10 minutes.

As we move into a serverless wold where devlopment work is done less on generic multipurpose servers that require patching both to the OS and to the application installed on them, things become easier and in some cases cheaper.

For instance I am currently working on a project that needs to send and recieve XML files from different sources and with no other requirements for a server, Azure storage seemed the perfect fit. As it's just a storage service you pay for what you need and nothing more. All the patching and maintencance of API's is provided by Microsoft and we have an instant place to store out files. Ideal!

However new technology always comes with new challenges. My first issue came with the plan on how we would be getting files in and out with partners. This isn't the first time I've worked with Azure File Storage, but it is the first time I did it without an opps person setting things up. Previously we used FTP, which while dated works with a lot of applications. Like a headphone jack it's not the most glamorus of connection, but it works, everyone knows how it works and everyone has things that work with it. However it transpires that despite Azure storage being 10 years old and reciving requests for FTP from the start, Microsoft have decided to go the same route as Apple with the headphone jack and not have it. Instead the only option for an integration is REST. As it transpires the opps people I had worked with in the past when faced with this issue had just put a VM infront of it, which kind of defeats the point of using Azure storage in the first place!

So we're going with REST and Microsoft provide quite a straightforward REST API all good so far, but how do we limit access? Well there's a guide to Using the Azure Storage REST API which contains a section on creating an authorisation header. It's long and overly complex, but does point you in the direction that to do this you need a Shared Access Signature. The other option is an access key, but this is something you should never give away to a third party.

Shared Access Signature

After a bit more digging through the documentation (and just clicking the thing that sounded right in the potal) I found this documentation on creating an Account SAS which sounded like what I wanted (it wasn't, but it's close).

With a shared access signature you can say what kind of service should be allowed, what permissions they should have, IP address's, start and end dates. All awesome things.

Once I had this I could then use the REST API, but there was a problem. I could access every folder in the storage account and there was no way to stop this! For integrating with 2 third partys they would both be able to access each others stuff, and our own private stuff.

There is also no way to revoke the SAS once it's been generated other than refreshing the access keys which would affect everyone.

Folder Level Shared Access Signature

After a bit more research I found what I was looking for. How to create a shared access signature at a folder or item level and how to link it to a policy.

The first thing you need is Azure Storage Explorer. Once your set up with this you will be able to view all your storage accounts.

From here you are able to browse to the folder you want to share right click it and choose Manage Access Policies.

This will open a dialoge to manage the policies for this specific object rather than the account.

Here you can set all the same permissions as you could for a signature at an account level but now for a specific object and against a policy rather than an actual signature, meaning the policy can be updated in the future with no change to the signature.

Better still you can remove the policy which will then invalidate any signature using it.

For the actual signature key right click the same folder and click Get Shared Access Signature.

Then in the dialoge select the policy from the drop down rather than spcifying the individual permissions.

Click create and you can copy the keys.

You now have an access key that is limited to a specific folder rather than the entire account.

This is only possible to do though one of the code/scripting interfaces. e.g. PowerShell or the storage explorer. The azure portal will only let you get signatures at an account level.