Introduction

In all of our previous chapters, we looked at how to create Azure Functions right from the Azure Management portal. Here are a few of the features:

• You can quickly create a function just by selecting one of the built-in templates provided by the Azure Function Runtime.
• Developers need not worry about writing the plumbing code and understanding how the frameworks work.
• Configuration changes can be made right within the UI using the standard editor.

In spite of all of the advantages mentioned, developers might not find it comfortable if they became used to working with their favorite Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) a long time ago. So, the Microsoft team has come up with some tools that help developers to integrate them into Visual Studio so that they can leverage some of the critical IDE features that accelerate their development efforts. Here are few of them:

• Developers benefit from IntelliSense support.
• You can debug code line by line.
• You can quickly view the values of the variables while you are debugging the application.
• There's integration with version control systems such as Azure DevOps (earlier, this was called Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)).

Currently, at the time of writing, the Visual Studio tools for the function supports debugging only for C#. In the future, Microsoft is likely to come up with all of these cool features for other languages. 

You will learn some of these aforementioned features in this chapter and see how to integrate code with Azure DevOps in Chapter 11, Implementing and Deploying Continuous Integration Using Azure DevOps.