A number of changes affect the operation of Azure Functions from .NET 3 to .NET 5. In this post, we look at integrating with Azure App Configuration.
Recently, Microsoft announced the availability of support for .NET 5 in Azure Functions. Upgrading is a little more complicated than usual. Normally we would just change netcoreapp3.1 over to net5.0 and have done with it. Not this time.
Historically, Azure Functions have always been tightly coupled with the version of the runtime, Long Term Support (LTS) specifically. This meant that until the Azure Functions team updated their runtime, you were stuck on specific versions of .NET.
Now, this changes with the Isolated Process model, also known in code as dotnet-isolated. We can, now, write in any version we like.
You’ll need to do a few things like update your CSPROJ file to include the updated TargetFramework (net5.0), AzureFunctionsVersion (v3), OutputType (Exe), and FunctionsSkipCleanOutput (true). Also, don’t forget to update your NuGet packages and local.settings.json file, the FUNCTIONS_RUNTIME will need changing to dotnet-isolated.
Changes to dependency injection
The biggest change though, if you are used to using Startup.cs and the Startup method which extends FunctionsStartup, then you no longer need this. When it comes to Azure App Configuration, we may have done something similar to this.
using System;using Microsoft.Azure.Functions.Extensions.DependencyInjection;using Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;[assembly: FunctionsStartup(typeof(FunctionApp.Startup))]namespace FunctionApp{ class Startup : FunctionsStartup { public override void ConfigureAppConfiguration(IFunctionsConfigurationBuilder builder) { string cs = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ConnectionString"); builder.ConfigurationBuilder.AddAzureAppConfiguration(cs); } public override void Configure(IFunctionsHostBuilder builder) { } }}Using the new dependency injection system, it’s more aligned to ASP.NET and uses the Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.HostBuilder class. Now, implementing Azure App Configuration using the new methodology, would require us to have the following inside our Main() function.
var host = new HostBuilder() .ConfigureAppConfiguration(options => { options.AddAzureAppConfiguration(config => { config.Connect(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ConnectionString")); }); }) .ConfigureFunctionsWorkerDefaults() .ConfigureServices(services => { services.AddAzureAppConfiguration(); }) .Build(); host.Run();Dependency injection from here, now works in the exact same way as before. In your function, add a reference to Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration, then declare your instance of IConfiguration.
private readonly IConfiguration _configuration;public Function1(IConfiguration configuration){ _configuration = configuration;}Here is an example implementation of this in a function.
[Function("Function1")]public HttpResponseData Run([HttpTrigger(AuthorizationLevel.Anonymous, "get", "post")] HttpRequestData req, FunctionContext executionContext){ var logger = executionContext.GetLogger("Function1"); string keyName = "TestApp:Settings:Message"; string message = _configuration[keyName]; var response = req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8"); response.WriteString(message); if (message != null) { return response; } else { var error = req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.BadRequest); error.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/text; charset=utf-8"); error.WriteString($"Please create a key-value with the key '{keyName}' in App Configuration.")); return error; }}Summary
You’ll need to be aware of other changes to things like HttpTrigger and TimerTrigger when moving to Azure Functions and .NET 5, but this means you can keep your existing investments in Azure App Configuration.
Martyn Coupland 