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 →

My notes for passing the AZ-300 and AZ-301 exams

A couple of weeks ago I’ve passed both the AZ-300 and AZ-301 exams. You’re required to pass both of these exams in to get the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. After posting a tweet I got a lot of responses asking if I had any pointers on what to learn. Instead of responding to each person individually it makes more sense to share what I’ve used to study and hopefully it’s helpful to others also. Read more →

How to search for users inside your Azure Active Directory (AAD)

If you’ve read my earlier post on authentication of actions invoked in a Microsoft Teams MessageCard, you’ve probably seen the only useful information we get in the user’s token is the Object Id (oid). { "iat": 1560799130, "ver": "STI.ExternalAccessToken.V1", "appid": "48afc8dc-f6d2-4c5f-bca7-069acd9cc086", "sub": "bc6c3ca0-5acd-4cd4-b54c-f9c83925e7e3", "appidacr": "2", "acr": "0", "tid": "4b1fa0f3-862b-4951-a3a8-df1c72935c79", "oid": "b26c3c10-5fad-4cd3-b54c-f9283922e7e2", "iss": "https://substrate.office.com/sts/", "aud": "https://serverlessdevops.azurewebsites.net", "exp": 1560800030, "nbf": 1560799130 } While this is nice, it doesn’t really tell us much. 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 →

Update your Microsoft Teams notifications via an Azure Function

In my latest post, I’ve shown you how you can use Azure Functions in your Microsoft Teams flow to handle errors in your environment. This stuff works great in a couple of projects I’ve worked on, but what would be even more awesome is to reply to a message in Teams when an action has completed after a button is pressed. Well, replying & modifying the original message with a status update is quite possible and I’ll show you how in this post. Read more →