In the past couple of years the software industry has come a long way in professionalizing the development environment. One of the things which has improved significantly is automating the builds and being able to continuously deploy software.
Having a continuous integration and -deployment environment is the norm nowadays, which means I (and probably you as a reader also) want to have this when creating Azure Functions also!
There are dozens of build servers and deployment tools available, but because Azure Functions are highly likely being deployed in Microsoft Azure, it makes sense to use Visual Studio Team Services with Release Management.
Read more →As with almost every application there is a point where you have to work with some kind of secret, like for example a connection string to a database. There are multiple ways to retrieve these secrets and this isn’t any different with Azure Functions.
If you have set up a continuous deployment build within Visual Studio Release Management you can just substitute the values in your build, which makes it easy, transparent and consistent to add and change the values.
Read more →A couple of days ago I read a very cool blog post by Scott Hanselman about Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures.
I had never heard about the word ligatures, but he explains it quite well. They are ‘characters’ which are made up by combining multiple individual characters as one. Apparently this is quite common in the Arabic languages. Well, no matter, the thing that does matter is the fact you can use this inside your development environment also!
Read more →Lately, I’ve been busy learning more about creating serverless solutions. Because my main interest lies within the Microsoft Azure stack I surely had to check out the Azure Functions offering.
Azure Functions enable you to create a serverless solutions which are completely event-based. As it’s located within the Azure space, you can integrate easily with all of the other Azure services, like for example the service bus, Cosmos DB, storage, but also external services like SendGrid and GitHub!
Read more →You’ve probably heard a lot of talk around a new buzzword serverless. It’s a pretty confusing name for an awesome technology/technique.
The main reason the word serverless isn’t a very good one is because it implies there aren’t any servers when using this technique. I found a fairly funny CommitStrip about this topic.
https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/04/26/servers-there-are-no-servers-here`
But what does the term mean then?
Well, it means you don’t have to worry about servers anymore.
Read more →There are dozens of blog posts, articles and books talking about microservices. Some of them talk about the design, other on how to implement and even others talk about why and when to use them.
This post will be a combination of them all. I won’t claim to be the all-time-expert on the matter, but I have read quite a bit on the subject, attended some talks and have had the honor to design (and implement) such a solution a couple of years ago.
Read more →It has become increasingly important to have your site secured via some kind of certificate. Even your Google ranking is affected by it.
The main problem with SSL/TLS certificates is the fact most of them cost money. Now, I don’t have any problem with paying some money for something like a certificate, but it will cost quite a lot if I want to set this up for all of my sites & domains.
Read more →For years we (a lot of people I know and myself included) have been using the Unit of Work and Repository pattern combined with each other. This makes quite a lot of sense as, in most cases, they both have something to do with your database calls.
When searching for both of these patterns you’ll often be directed to a popular article on the Microsoft documentation site. The sample code over there has a very detailed implementation on how you can implement both of these patterns for accessing and working with your database.
Read more →On a recent project I had to implement the decorator pattern to add some functionality to the existing code flow.
Not a big problem of course. However, on this project we were using Autofac for our dependency injection framework so I had to check how to implement this pattern using the framework built-in capabilities. One of the reasons I always resort to Autofac is the awesome and comprehensive documentation. It’s very complete and most of the time easy to understand.
Read more →As of late, there are a couple of Store apps which just won’t install on any of my Windows 10 machines (One Commander and Open Live Writer in case you are interested).
The message shown is:
The error code is 0x80073CF9, in case you need it.
If you do a search on the error number you’ll find numerous posts and articles explaining on how this error might be solved. As it happens, the error also occurs on Windows Phone/Mobile systems.
Read more →