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 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 →

Warming up your App Service

Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc. I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions. Read more →

Enable SSL for your Azure Functions

You might remember me writing a post on how you can set up your site with SSL while using Let’s Encrypt and Azure App Services. Well, as it goes, the same post applies for Azure Functions. You just have to do some extra work for it, but it’s not very hard. Simon Pedersen, the author of the Azure Let’s Encrypt site extension, has done some work in explaining the steps on his GitHub wiki page. Read more →

Use bindings with Azure Functions

(Almost) No one likes writing code meant to store data to a repository, queues, blobs. Let alone triggering your code when some event occurs in one of those areas. Luckily for us the Azure Functions team has decided to use bindings for this. By leveraging the power of bindings, you don’t have to write your own logic to store or retrieve data. Azure Functions provides all of this functionality out of the box! Read more →