Version 2.0.1 of BcContainerHelper was shipped with a number of very exciting new featuers. This blog post will list the features and I will have to document them elsewhere.
I will create a number of blog posts describing these things in greater detail.
Also, based on feedback, I better spend some time going through old blog posts and ensure that the content matches current functionality AND create an actual reference documentation on current functionality instead of blog posts only…
Why did I add functionality in the BcContainerHelper to work with online environments? Why not create these functions in a separate PowerShell module? and why not enable compiling and publishing without using containers?
The reason that the new functions exists inside BcContainerHelper is that I did not want to create another PowerShell module and have BcContainerHelper have a dependency on that, simply due to time constraints and the reason for still using containers is that with containers, I can be sure that all the pre-requisite components are installed in the right locations and that I do not contaminate the host. In the end, the changes to the compile-, publish-, run-tests- etc. functions to work with online environments is very limited – it is really just the authentication and then calculating the URL to connect to.
Why is New-BcAuthContext not using ADAL (Active Directory Authentication Library) or MSAL (Microsoft Authentication Library)?
ADAL is history, nobody should use ADAL today when creating new functionality. MSAL is future and I did investigate using MSAL, but I really didn’t want to add a dependency in BcContainerHelper at this time. I didn’t want to struggle with people having wrong versions of MSAL or having other things conflicting with MSAL. Also MSAL might go to dotnet core before I can and stop supporting dotnet framework altogether. So, I decided to go native. I might change the implementation in the future though.
Stay tuned for a number of upcoming blog posts.
Freddy KristiansenTechnical Evangelist