azure

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

This post is part of a series on hosting your Hugo website on Azure. Keep an eye on this website for future articles. Intro As you might have seen or read somewhere, I’ve migrated the previous version of my personal website, which was in WordPress, to the current one that is made in Hugo. One of the reasons for migrating away from WordPress was the fact that due to a vulnerability in one of the WordPress modules, spammers were able to use my account to send out a lot of mails.

Intro The possibilities for software development have changed tremendously over the past couple of years. Actually, it’s better to say that the number of options has increased tremendously. With the final breakthrough and continuous expansion of the cloud, the supply of different types for resources like compute and data store is larger than ever before. And while you can even find a decision tree for selecting the right type of compute to use in for instance Microsoft Azure, selecting the right type of data store to use for your application is no simple feat.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack. My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework. The short answer: yes, this is possible! For the slightly longer answer: keep reading 🤓

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔 Time to investigate…! Finding the cause 🧐 First step of course was to find the cause of the exception.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkeland I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓 We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how! Who will we see Tuesday, October 1 • 3:00pm – 4:00pm • room 3? UPDATE That. Was.

Some time ago Oscar van Tol and I started creating video content for the community. We call them #Betatalks and create them because of two very important reasons: We believe in sharing knowledge It’s. So. Much. Fun. 🤣 We talk about a lot of developer stuff: from “Microsoft Build 2019 Highlights” in episode 1 to “C# 8, What’s new?” in episode 4. The most recent #Betatalks is episode 5: “All about configuration in Azure”.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go! When the API you want to call uses Cookie Authentication, this seems pretty straightforward too. After all, the HTTP Action has an Authentication property you can set. However, this property doesn’t include Cookie authentication.

I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻 A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events. It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions. This post elaborates on [blog/using-triggers-bindings-in-azure-functions-v2](Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2). First try The idea was simple:

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes. Writing to Blob Storage Consider this very simple BlobTriggered Azure Function. It copies the triggering file into a different container in Azure Blob Storage:

The issue While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error: npm failed with return code: 4294963248 The exit code for the task was -4048. Strange thing is that we have our build agents running on-prem, but running this task locally on our dev machines worked just fine. We found out pretty quickly that it was an authentication issue. Because of this we thought that the npm publish task of Azure DevOps might have issues with getting the authentication right for the registry.

This Thursday December 6th I’ll be speaking at Azure Thursday - December 2018. The last of the regular Azure Thursdays this year. This is a group for all developers, consultants, architects and IT professionals who want to dive into for them unknown topics related to Azure. Azure Thursday are happening every first Thursday of the month and the format will be different every evening. From hand-on workshops to technical talks.

A few weeks ago I ordered some teXXmo® IoT Buttons to play around with. I wanted to jump right in, but I had to look some stuff up to be able to get it up and running, connecting to the right WiFi and IoT Hub. Here’s a short recap of how to get started with the teXXmo® IoT Button. Starting the device There are several modes the button can work in: sending its payload, configuring the button and running webREPL.

Here’s a quicky: Oscar van Tol and I are joining forces again on Thursday June 21st. This time we’re telling you everything there is to know on leveraging the power of different Azure services to supercharge your web application. And the session is appropriately titled Supercharge your web application with Azure ?. Or SCYWAWA for short (hint: this might become the twitter hashtag as well…). The sessions is part of the 49th WAZUG NL event and will be hosted at Betabit’s head office in Rotterdam.

One of the time consuming tasks we’re facing at my current assignment is inviting users to our Azure Active Directory tenant. Especially since we (used to) do this in the Azure Portal. We’re using Azure Active Directory B2B to which external users are invited as guests. We investigated using Microsoft Graph to automate this process. Since there’s several things to take into account when implementing this, here’s a quick HowTo.

While cleaning up the app registrations in my Azure Active Directory, I ran into two applications I couldn’t delete since the ‘Delete’ button is not clickable. I’ve had this happen for both application types: both Web app/API and Native. It’s actually pretty simple to enable removing these app registrations: make sure the application is not Multi-tenanted. * * Designates whether users in external organizations are allowed to grant your app access to data in their organization’s directory.

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid. Serverless, Azure Functions and Azure Event Grid My session was Going Serverless (2/2): Hands-on with Azure Event Grid.

Do you live in or near The Netherlands? Would you like to know everything there is to know about Serverless Computing? Join Oscar van Tol and myself on September 20th. We will be presenting the knowledge session “Dude, Where’s my Server?” organised by Betabit and Blaak Selectie. If you don’t need any additional information and just want to reserve a spot, send an email to evenementen@betabit.nl with your name and phone number.

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure. Camera resolutions keep increasing, your digital behavior on websites and in apps is collected, images that satellites make get more and more detailed and (research) equipment produces more data. The amount of data that’s being stored keeps increasing.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.