Using dynamically linked Azure Key Vault secrets in your ARM template

I’m in the process of adding an ARM template to an open source project I’m contributing to. All of this was pretty straightforward, until I needed to add some secrets and connection strings to the project. While it’s totally possible to integrate these secrets in your ARM parameter file or in your continuous deployment pipeline, I wanted to do something a bit more advanced and secure. Of course, Azure Key Vault comes to mind! Read more →

Sharing an Outlook ICS file with your friends

Normally when you are creating new appointments via Outlook in your organization you are inviting everyone who should join the meeting. This works quite alright, but not something I wanted to do for a couple of meetings I am planning. The meetings I’m organizing are optional to everyone inside the company, therefore I don’t want to spam the inbox of everyone with a meeting most of them (probably around 95%) aren’t interested in. Read more →

Warming up your WCF Service on an Azure Cloud Service

You might remember me writing on how to warm up your App Service instances when moving between slots. The use of the applicationInitialization-element is implemented on nearly every IIS webserver nowadays and works great, until it doesn’t. I’ve been working on a project which has been designed, as I’d like to call it, a distributed monolith. To give you an oversimplified overview, here’s what we have. First off we have a single page web application which communicates directly to an ASP. Read more →

Using Application Insights in order to keep track of your Azure Functions

The last two posts had me writing about how logging can be implemented in your Azure Functions and how you can reuse class libraries using a different logging library, like log4net. You probably already have some logging- and monitoring system in place, but if you’re starting to use Azure Functions (or any other Azure service for that matter), the best tooling to use is Application Insights, in my opinion. You don’t even have to use Azure services in order to use Application Insights. Read more →

Using log4net in your Azure Functions

As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are 2 options available to you out of the box for logging. You can either use the TraceWriter or the ILogger. While this is fine when you are doing some small projects or Functions, it can become a problem if you want your Azure Functions to reuse earlier developed logic or modules used in different projects, a Web API for example. In these shared class libraries you are probably leveraging the power of a ‘full-blown’ logging library. Read more →