I'm going to deploy a simple web API app from Visual Studio to Azure App Services. First, I'll download the lorrylogapi code from the Cloud academy get-started-app-service-net5 repository on Github. After unzipping the file, I can double click on the project file,  LorryLogAPI.csproj, to open it in Visual Studio. Once the project is loaded, we can look at appsettings.json to see the database connection string to enable the app to connect to the Azure SQL database. For those that are curious, this is a C# MVC, model-view-controller app, and it's the vehicles controller's default HttpGet method that will return our data.  Let's run the application locally to see the result. Even though this is running on my PC, I can retrieve the data from Azure SQL because I set a firewall rule on the lorrylogserver.database.windows.net server allowing my IP address access. Clicking the green debug arrow will compile and run the app. Here we can see it's running on my localhost web server, and because I had the vehicles controller open when I ran the app Visual Studio has defaulted to the vehicles URL.

Now let's publish to Azure App Service. Azure and Visual Studio are both Microsoft products, so there is excellent integration between them, meaning the publishing process can be done seamlessly from within Visual Studio if you're logged into both with the same Microsoft account. Select publish from the Build menu. We have several target options, with the top one being Azure. Import profile allows you to import a publish profile from the App Service resource, enabling you to easily publish when you aren't logged into the Azure portal and Visual Studio with the same account. In the profile document, you can see an Azure generated user name and password for connecting via FTP to the publishing URL. We won't be using the publishing profile, so let's go back to Visual Studio. Having selected Azure as the generic target, we are then prompted for an Azure specific target. Here I'll select App Service Windows and click Next. On the App Service tab, we can see my subscription has been detected from my account, and because the view is Resource group, the lorrylog app service in the NewWebApp resource group is displayed. I'll select lorrylog and click finish. 

We're almost ready to publish, with critical resource details such as framework, resource group, and site URL correctly displayed. Before we do, I want to configure the SQL server dependency. You might be thinking, why would I need to do that when I have the database connection string in the app settings file? Developers don't always have access to the login details of production or QA databases and maybe working with their own local databases. Connection strings can be saved in a number of locations, as we can see here. Saving to Azure App Settings will create a connection string entry under configuration that will be used by the app once deployed. The connection string is retrieved by name, so when deploying, you can enter a different connection string name than the one you have locally as long as it exists in the App Service configuration. I'll click next, leave the default selections and click Finish to deploy the relevant software libraries to support database functionality. Now let's publish to the cloud. This is not an error. A web API doesn't have a home page, and the only URL that returns a result is vehicles, so I'll have to type that into the address bar. There we go. A web API app up and running on Azure App Services.