Enhancing Docker build pipelines based on external tags

Introduction

In my last blog post I’ve described how you would use process isolation in your .NET project.

However, it caused a new problem: you would need to manage multiple Docker images for your own images, e.g.:

• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:ltsc2016
• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:ltsc2019
• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:1903
• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:1909
• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:2004
• myregistry.com/mssql/windows:2009

So, instead of having a single image, you would need to have six times as much now. This post will give you some tools and hints on how to solve this problem.

⚠️ This post will talk about Microsoft and .NET, however the solution is platform and language agnostic. It can be used whether you are using .NET, Python, Linux, FreeBSD, Java etcetera. It does not matter. As long as you want to query a Docker registry API to base your images on.

.NET, Docker and Visual Studio

Introduction

At my employer, theFactor.e, we started using Docker containers for our .NET application development. Since we have multiple developers with different Windows versions (Windows 10 (ranging from versions 1903 to 2004) and Windows Server 2016 / 2019) we used the default isolation mode (which was a mix of Hyper-V and process isolation modes).

This blog post will address this issue and will make sure we will use the correct image version so we can always use process isolation 🥳.