Getting the group claims when authenticating with Azure Active Directory

I started working on some internal web applications for a customer. For these types of applications, it makes a lot of sense to use Azure Active Directory to authenticate users and use their AAD groups/roles to authorize them on specific pages. I wanted to authorize users by the AAD groups they are placed in. Some users can access Production data, while others are only allowed to access data from the Test environment, all based on the groups they are in. Read more →

Installing ASP.NET Core preview and beta to your App Service

A couple of weeks ago I was busy creating some proof of concept applications using Blazor, which was still labeled preview at the time. To get all of this deployed and working in an Azure App Service, I needed the preview .NET Core runtime installed. An App Service is a PaaS offering, which means you don’t have any influence on what version of the software gets installed on the underlying system. Read more →

Authentication of Microsoft Teams MessageCards actions in your API

Being able to create Message Cards or Actionable Messages in Microsoft Teams via a Logic App or an Azure Function is great. Especially if you can use this to invoke logic on your API and update the message in the Teams channel. However, you don’t want everyone to invoke a management API endpoint you’ve exposed to ‘do stuff’ in your cloud environment. Normally, you’d want to authenticate if the user pressing the button (read: invoking the endpoint). Read more →

Doing your DevOps stuff with Azure Functions instead of Logic Apps

So, a couple of weeks back I wrote about leveraging the power of Logic Apps to retrieve Alerts from within your Azure ecosystem and send them to Microsoft Teams. This works great and a fellow Azure MVP, Tom Kerkhove, has enhanced the Logic Apps Template when handling Azure Monitor events.I’m starting to become a pretty big van of Logic Apps, but there are some (obvious) downsides to it. First, they live inside your Azure Portal. Read more →

Create your own custom bindings with Azure Functions

The default Azure Functions runtime comes with quite a lot of bindings and triggers which enable you to create a highly scalable solution within the Azure environment. You can connect to service buses, storage accounts, Event Grid, Cosmos DB, HTTP calls, etc. However, sometimes this isn’t enough. That’s why the Azure Functions team has released functionality which enables you to create your own custom bindings. This should make it easy for you to read and write data to any service or location you need to, even if it’s not supported out of the box. Read more →