Azure Functions, Node.js and Environment Variables

Another fun project (yes another one) using 2 of my favourite frameworks: serverless with Azure Functions and Node.js. I'm developing locally using the Azure Functions Core Tools (former CLI) and Visual Studio Code. It's a match made in heaven as I get to be super productive using the CLI and at the same time feel like a proper developer debugging issues in VS Code. I can attest that I don't have a single Console.log() in my JavaScript code. Since this is a real-life project, I get to do more than just simple "hello world" samples and slowly but …[read more]

Deploy your ASP.NET Core app to Azure Service Fabric

Service Fabric is Azure's highly scalable, multi-node, always-on solution that's designed to make deployment and running of distributed micro-services (and not only) a breeze. It provides a lot of features and functionality out of the box, allowing you to focus on the business value of your solution instead of the architectural and design decisions that could delay your path to production/market. There's great, impartial set of articles on micro-services published by Microsoft, along many, so if you want a crash course introduction, then I would urge you to have a read here. This is not the one true source …[read more]

Speaking at FEConf 2017 - All about VS Code and JavaScript

This year I had the pleasure and privilege to be invited to speak at FEConf2017, a free, web-based conference devoted to Front End development and all things JavaScript. I took this opportunity to speak about one of the tools I love so much and one that I use daily for most of my coding - Visual Studio Code. My talk focused on how VS Code is a great (if not the best) text editor/IDE for working with JavaScript or TypeScript and I tried to showcase the excellent work that the core VS Code team and the community has done, …[read more]

.NET Core Dependency Injection with constructor parameters

This post will be short and sweet, albeit one that caused me a bit of a headache. I recently worked on an ASP.NET Core project and I wanted to take advantage of the built-in Dependency Injection service to inject various services to the controllers. However, one of the services required a parameter in the constructor. This is not highly unusual so I was expecting to quickly find an example in the official docs, explaining how to do this. My search, however, returned no results. I then turned to Google/Bing but guess what? Nothing. Every example I found re-iterated …[read more]

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]