Azure Functions: Develop and Debug Using Visual Studio

Admittedly, the Function that we created yesterday doesn’t do a whole lot more than respond to an incoming HTTP request with “Hello” and a name. Let’s add a little bit of complexity to our demo by creating a new function using Visual Studio.

Prerequisites

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• Visual Studio 2015 (Any Edition)
• Azure Subscription
• Azure 2.9.6 .NET SDK
• Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions
• Node + NPM
• Azure Functions CLI

Download the “Hello World” Function

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Navigate to your Azure Functions App in the portal. Click Platform Features → Advanced tools (Kudu) → Debug console → Powershell. Navigate to “site” and download the contents of wwwroot as a .zip file.

Adding our Hello Function to a Solution

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Create an empty solution in Visual Studio. You can either:

1. Create a native Azure Function project (simplest approach) — copy the wwwroot contents into it and start debugging with F5.
2. Create an empty ASP.Net Web Application following Microsoft’s recommendation to use class libraries.

Either way, you can debug locally using F5 and test with Postman using your local URL.

Conclusion

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We’ve gone from hosting our Hello World Function on Azure App Service to being able to develop and debug locally.

What’s next:

• Developing in VS Code and Powershell
• Deploy from source control
• Going beyond Hello World