Continuous deployment of Azure Service Fabric Application

I’m doing a fair amount of work where the backend is made up using a Azure Service Fabric Application.

Setting up a continuous build and deployment pipeline in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) I ran into the following problem when the deployment step ran:

[error]Exception while parsing XML file: d:\a\_temp\TestApplicationPackage_2648631722\o0cl5dgw.ynx\applicationpackage\ApplicationManifest.xml
FileName: d:\a\_temp\TestApplicationPackage_2648631722\o0cl5dgw.ynx\applicationpackage\ApplicationManifest.xml

I’m (still) using VS2015. The version of the Service Fabric SDK is 5.7.0-preview5718. The current fabric version is 5.6.210.9494.

So it did not look like an issue with the versions. Note, that there was a bug in the version 5.5 of the SDK, which gave you errors when you tried to deploy your application to a newer cluster.

When I created the deployment step in VSTS I just seleted the default task and made no modifications apart from pointing the environment to the correct cluster. Here you must be sure to use the correct method of authentication (I use certificate based).

Digging a little further I noticed that the default agent was “Hosted”. I changed this to “Hosted2017” and voila Problem solved.

For consistency I also changed the default agent on the build task to “Hosted2017”.

Now to set up semantic versioning and maybe upgrade my VS to 2017.