After a rough first few years, .NET Core is here to deliver modern cross-platform .NET development. As the tools are also maturing, many companies have started to adopt it in their projects. Now, what we need is a build automation system that fits right in — modular, cross-platform, integrated with the development tools and with a C#-based DSL. As it turns out, a tool just like that already exists: Cake.

In this session, we’ll explore what Cake can do for us by automating the build of an ASP.NET Core app from start to finish. We’ll use it to compile, test, package and deploy our application — all using C#. We’ll also stay true to the .NET Core lifestyle by developing the build script on macOS, running it in a CI server on Linux and using it to deploy on Azure.

.NET Core gives us the freedom to write apps once and run them anywhere — Cake promises to do the same for our build scripts. Let’s see how.