DevOps easier with Logic Apps and Teams

I’ve written about empowering your Teams with Azure Functions a while back, but this isn’t the only way to create value. You can also use Azure Logic Apps. Logic Apps are a way to express powerful integrations with (several different) systems in a visual workflow based way. It has a lot of similarities with other (Microsoft) workflow systems from the past, so it should strike very familiar to most (Enterprise) developers. 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 →

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 →

What’s up with this serverless talk?

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 →

Enhancing performance with 1 stylesheet and a custom handler

Including a lot of files in your website can impact the performance of your site. Your browser needs to request all those files from the webserver(s) and download them individually. Luckily this fetching is pretty fast and your browser can do multiple requests at once. However, there is a maximum to the number of requests a browser can make, so if you include 100 external files, will probably be (relatively) slow. Read more →