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 →

Setting up your site with SSL and Let’s Encrypt on Azure App Services

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 →

Custom deployment steps for an Azure App Service

I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations. On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live. Read more →

Website live tiles in Windows 8

Windows 8 has given us a lot of new and cool features for both developers and users. One of these features is the possibility to pin websites to your start screen. Default this tile will look like the favicon of the website, but you are also able to change the pinned tile to a live tile. The live tile will get the necessary information from the RSS feed of the website. Read more →