Building Custom Tools into Dotnet Core
Use the ‘dotnet tool’ command to build, package and deploy custom CLI tools
Deploying SQL database changes is one of those tricky things which often catches you out. Getting SQL databases updated in an automated and consistent way is a desirable quality in a deployment system. I’ve used a number of them over my career, with mixed success.
Years ago, our team discovered the amazing RoundhousE, an automated SQL database deployment (change management) system for deploying SQL database data and schema scripts. RoundhousE lets you version the schema and up scripts so that once you deploy them once, RoundhousE will know never to deploy them again.
Back when we first starting using it, RoundhousE was a windows CLI app, built as an exe. You had to download a zip file and extract it (and all the dependencies in DLLs), then add it to your path to be able to use it. This was fine back in the day, but as years have advanced, clearly there was a need for such a tool to make its way to the dotnet core space. Running such a tool in a Linux space (especially a CI/CD pipeline on Azure or AWS) is what is needed. Removing the need to add the tool to the path also would be a time-saver, removing that extra configuration out of the equation.
