Visual Studio Code integration with Azure Application Insights

I don't know how I've missed this but today I found out that Visual Studio Code (VS Code) provides excellent integration with Application Insights (AI). If you're not using AI for monitoring your apps (any app, any code) then you're missing out big time. Regardless of whether you're running on the cloud or on-premises, AI can light up your application in many interesting ways and give you a unique insight on areas such as: Exceptions Events User actions Custom events and metrics Dependency mapping Analytics Proactive improvements with AI and Machine Learning I believe that a separate blog post is …[read more]

Secure Azure ARM templates with Key Vault and VSTS

Azure ARM templates are the recommended way for standardising and automating resource deployments to Azure. The resource manager engine that drives the current portal and is also responsible for managing your infrastructure, where everything is a resource (VMs, WebApps, CosmosDB etc). ARM templates are JSON files that describe what your infrastructure looks like and comes with some great benefits: Infrastructure as Code Idempotent Source Control Tool flexibility Tighter security and control For this post, I would like to focus a bit on security and show you how to leverage some of the built-in Azure features to improve your overall Azure …[read more]

Securing Azure Storage Tables with SAS authentication and CORS in .NET

I'm currently working on a side project as an excuse to try some of the latest code features and functionality in .NET Core. It's a small project with a couple of models and basic CRUD. The project is going to touch everything new such as ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview, .NET Standard 2.0 Preview, Azure Storage SDK for .NET Coreetc. It was a conscious decision as I wanted to see how the latest tooling and libraries would work. The migration from MVC 5 -> ASP.NET Core project was mainly painless with a few small changes, but remember …[read more]

A new Powershell experience with Visual Studio Code

PowerShell is an amazing tool used heavily to manage a plethora of Windows and Microsoft services. With the release of the latest PowerShell as a cross-platform tool, this experience has been extended to Linux and MacOS as well. You can use PowerShell to do pretty much anything, from managing Windows OS features, to configuring SharePoint and SQL to executing maintenance tasks and even run code (.NET). Yes, that's right. Because PowerShell was built with code execution and extensibility in mind, you can easily import any .NET Framework APIs and work directly with them embedding C# code inside your scripts. In …[read more]

Introduction to Azure Functions Deployment Slots

Deployment slots have been an invaluable feature for Azure Web Apps for a long time. To find out how to create slots for Azure Web Apps, you can visit the official documentation here. So what makes deployment slots so useful? I summarize some of the benefits below but this is by no means the exhaustive list: Testing in Production - A/B Testing Hot deployments that allow deployment to production with no downtime UAT testing targeting a near live environment Easy roll out and roll back Full or incremental swapping DevOps integration with slots (VSTS deployment directly to slot) many …[read more]

DDD South West Retrospect

This is going to be a short post since I only managed to experience only part of the overall conference. Life and work commitments meant that I had to fly to Bristol later in the day, missing out on the speakers dinner. The dinner is way more than just food. In fact, I've noticed that I rarely pay any attention to the, otherwise tasty, food. That's because the speaker's dinner is an excellent opportunity to meet up with new speakers and catch up with old friends. These dinners also tend to run late in the night with the conversation moved …[read more]