How to continue to use ASP.NET Core RC1 tooling on Azure

Question

We have a project using ASP.NET Core RC1 on Azure. This is using continuous deployment and has been working without issue for months. We plan to convert this project to use RC2 and the associated dotnet CLI tools shortly, although we can't do this just yet.

Our builds are working fine locally. However we have recently started getting build errors when we deploy to live, chiefly the following (taken from the deployment log on Azure):

Compiling Infrastructure for DNX,Version=v4.5.1
D:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet\dotnet.exe compile-csc @D:\home\site\repository\Source\Infrastructure\obj\Release\dnx451\dotnet-compile.rsp returned Exit Code 1

My assumption looking at this is that Azure is now using the RC2 toolchain by default, even though we wish to stick with RC1 for the time being (we have had the following in our global.json file for months)

{
    "sdk": {
    "version": "1.0.0-rc1-update1"
    },
    .........
}

Is this assumption correct, and is there a way to force the build process to continue to use the RC1 components (dnx etc.) for the time being?

Answer 1

This thread suggests that RC1 is now no longer supported "out of the box" for these deployments, and references a post providing two workarounds to this issue:

1. Use a custom deployment script

2. Manually set the version of Kudu in App Settings

I have chosen the latter as this was the quickest implementation, and our deployments are now building correctly as before.