Using HTTPS with Azure Functions in local development

It's usually the small things that make a big difference. As I was updating my Function Core tools today (the Functions CLI) I was pleasantly surprised to notice some new functionality which was added to the tooling. The Functions team has added the capability to enforce/use HTTPS when developing and debugging in the local development using the Functions Core tools. If you're new to Azure Functions and never used the Core tools, then you may be surprised to find that we now have 2 versions of the tools. I know, but stay with me because they currently server different …[read more]

ASP.NET Core SAML Authentication with Azure AD

I love delegated authentication. I strongly feel that this is one of the priorities that the ASP.NET Core team got right by "forcing" or better coercing developers and companies to use an external service to manage user authentication and authorisation. The right route. Why? Only a couple of days T-Mobile Austria made the news (and Twitter news) for claiming that they have "Amazingly Good Security" while storing users' passwords in clear text! You can read all about it here. However, we're not here to lament on other peoples' bad security. There are too many things wrong with this example …[read more]

Enforcing HTTPS only traffic with ASP.NET Core and Kestrel

In the early days of ASP.NET Core, Kestrel (the lightweight, open source web server) was fairly basic. And this was totally intentional! Kestrel provides a mechanism to spin up and run ASP.NET Core websites and APIs fast and efficiently with as little overhead as possible. This, combined with the other ASP.NET Core improvements (90% smaller HTTP requests etc) have contributed to ASP.NET Core's speed. Kestrel was great at its job but in some cases proved to be very basic. It's important to understand that Kestrel was never intended to run applications in production. Instead, the recommendation …[read more]

.NET Core authentication and authorisation using Auth0

I'm a big proponent of delegated authentication. It's no surprise that Broken Authentication is #2 at the OWASP top 10 latest report. It's been #2 for a very long time, which means that developers and enterprises are still getting this wrong. There are so many ways that authentication that can go wrong, that delegated authentication should be the preferred and possibly the default choice for all platforms. There are many different services that can provide this. I've heavily worked with Azure AD and Azure AD B2C but this time I wanted to take Auth0 for a spin. In this post …[read more]

Using Azure Serverless to copy data from Service Bus to Azure Data Lake

Microsoft's serverless is continually improving with better stability and features. The out-of-the-box integration with many services makes serverless an appealing approach when it comes to solving a problem. I was recently asked by a customer to implement a solution that copies json data posted to a Service Bus Topic into an Azure DataLake in order to run offline analytics and reporting. At this point, I would have suggested using Azure EventGrid instead of Service Bus, since the solution needs to support multiple subscribers and it's a lot more lightweight. However, Service Bus Topics can also accommodate multiple subscribers and, besides, …[read more]