ring! - one ring to rule them all...

Ring brings order into the messy world of developing and debugging a cloud-ready microservice system side by side with maintaining and migrating legacy ones where you may have many different types of services (ASP.NET Core, Topshelf, WCF) hosted in many different ways (IIS Express, WindowsService, Exe) and scattered across many solutions and repositories.

Requirements

The extension requires the ring dotnet cli tool.

How it works

Ring groups runnables (mostly services but not only) into workspaces. Workspaces are defined in TOML files. Workspaces are composed from runnables and other workspaces. A workspace can be loaded and started. Ring periodically runs a health check for every runnable, tries restarting the unhealthy ones, and reports the dead ones. Ring also exposes a web socket interface. Visual Studio extensions use it mainly for visualizing workspace/runnables states, turning services off/on for build/debugging if they're a part of the currently loaded project/solution.

Usage

1. Activate Ring window

2. Connect to Ring by clicking on the double arrow icon.
3. Load a workspace using the first icon in the Ring window. The path will display in red if the currently opened solution contains no projects from the workspace.
4. Start or stop running the workspace with the appropriate icons.
5. If the all the rings turn into bright green your workspace is up and running.

• Stop or start an individual project by clicking on its ring.
• The output of what has started, or failed to start is shown in the opened ring console window.
• More detailed output can be found in Visual Studio's Output window (Show output from ring!).
• When running a ring workspace do not clean projects as this will make your services unable to start (the bin folder will be gone)
• You can debug as per normal; when a project is run by Visual Studio ring will allow VS to take over. Ring will automatically restart the runnable once Visual Studio stops debugging.