From the course: Azure Functions for Developers

Before you start - Azure Tutorial

From the course: Azure Functions for Developers

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Before you start

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- [Instructor] Before we begin, there are some important details that I want you to know. To get the most out of this course, you'll need to have a working knowledge of .NET Core and the C# programming language. Previous experience on dependency injection and the configuration infrastructure in .NET Core will be nice to have, but not required. You also need to know the Azure Cloud basics in terms of how to provision resources and how to navigate the Azure Portal. Regarding the required software, in this course we'll use Visual Studio 2019 as our primary development environment. As you can see here, the latest version at the time of this recording is version 16.7.3. We're going to use the Azure Functions Core Tools, which is the main piece of software that allows us to develop, test, and publish Azure Functions. If you choose the Azure Development Workload when installing Visual Studio 2019, the tools will be installed automatically. As you can see here, this component, Azure Functions, and Web Junk Tools is the component that includes Azure Functions Core Tools. Another way to test this is if I open PowerShell and I type func, which is the main application of the Azure Functions Core Tools. As you can see here, I'm using version 3.0.2881. On the other hand, if you prefer to use Visual Studio Code, please do so. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic code editor. Just make sure that you have installed the Azure Functions extension. As you can see here, in the Extensions menu, I can see that I have installed Azure Functions. This allows me to run natural functions, and the ball catcher functions, and publish them to Azure, and so on. Azure Development is awesome. However, I found that to be more productive, you want to use your local machine as much as possible. So we're going to use the Azure Cosmos DB emulator, which, as the name implies, is a local emulator for Cosmos DB that includes the identical functionality as Azure Cosmos DB, including support for creating and querying data. On the flip side, it requires Windows. In a similar way, we're going to use the Windows Azure Storage emulator, which is installed with the Azure SDK. It's a tool that emulates the Azure Blob, Queue, and Table Services for local development purposes. This emulator uses a local SQL Server, local DB instance, to emulate the historic services. Again, it requires Windows, but there is an alternative here, which is to use Azurite across platform Azure Storage emulator that runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Here is the website of the Azurite project in GitHub. A nice way to access these storage services, both local and remotes, is to use Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. This application allows you to access your storage accounts and upload data to them. As you can see here, the latest version of this tool is version 1.15.1. Finally, we'll use Azure CLI to work with function apps and natural functions through the command line. At the time of this recording, the latest version of the Azure Command Line Interface tool is version 2.11.1.

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