Getting started with testing in .NET Core

.NET Core has been in production (RTM) since June 2016, when it was officially released at the Red Had Summit by Scott Hanselman. What a glorious moment! Announcing an open source framework at a conference for Linux! Who would have thought that this would be possible some years ago? .NET Core 3.1 is the current (LTS) version but I'm also really looking forward to .NET 5, the one that unifies all .NET frameworks and becomes the next best version of .NET. You can download .NET 5 and take it for a spin today! Unit testing your apps is an …[read more]

TypeScript 2.0 RC with Visual Studio Code

You know how much I love new, shiny things? For some odd reason, I'm compelled to try the latest and 'greatest' as soon as I know it's available. This, oftentimes, has inadvertent side effects such as breaking my machine and causing me undue stress. I also choose to do these upgrades/updates close to upcoming talking engagements. In summary, I'm a gluten for self-inflicted punishment. On the other side, I suffer so you don't have to :) Today, I decide to test the latest version of TypeScript 2.0 RC which was released only 2 days ago. I also chose to …[read more]

Run SSH with PowerShell

I'm currently working on a somewhat restricted environment where we have to run SSH commands on a Windows Server. The commands are needed to configure certain settings on a Linux machine running [Puppet](https://puppet.com/product/capabilities/orchestration" target="_blank) (the orchestration tool). This is the first time I had to use this setup so, as with everything else, I had to work out how to do it - and then blog about it! For the purpose of this post, I provisioned a small Ubuntu VM on Azure in order to be able to SSH into it …[read more]

Automate login for Azure Powershell scripts with Service Principals

Automation is great. It's the bedrock of any successful IT department and the default solution for any task that has to be repeated more than once. I'm a big proponent of automation and, since I spend most of my time in Azure, I try to automate as many tasks as I can. Today, I'll explain how to automate your Azure login in order to allow your scripts to run without any supervision. Disclaimer: many of these tasks should be running using the [Azure Automation service](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/automation/" target="_blank) because of better integration …[read more]

Entity Framework Core 1.0 - Table Valued Functions and LINQ Composition

Entity framework Core (EFCore) has been out for a few weeks now after hitting RTM on June 27th 2016. That was also the same day that ASP.NET Core was released. EFCore has brought many changes, to say the least. It was renamed to Core instead the logical continuation from Entity Framework, because it's a total rewrite. Very similar to ASP.NET Core. The rewrite brought many benefits with speed being the biggest one. EF Core is simpler and a lot more powerful, even though it's still early days and some things are not working as expected or are missing. …[read more]

Copying blob data between storage accounts on Azure. Did you say scale? (part 1)

A couple of weeks ago I [published a post](GHOST_URL/copy-azure-blob-data-between-storage-accounts-using-functions/" target="_blank) for copying data between storage accounts using Azure Functions. The code for the function is quite basic and responds only to upload events. Every time someone uploads blobs to a container monitored by the Function, the blob gets automatically copied across to the destination storage account. That’s great for small workloads. But, what about copying 100k blobs from one storage account to another? And how about making that task super scalable? Challenge accepted! In this post I will explain how to solve this …[read more]

ASP.NET Core from the command line

ASP.NET Core (formerly known as ASP.NET 5 or vNext) runs on top of the new [DotNet Core](https://www.microsoft.com/net/core" target="_blank) and is in love with the command line. Although [Visual Studio 2015](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx" target="_blank) is still an excellent IDE and [Visual Studio Code](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx" target="_blank) an amazing code editor, the new iteration of ASP.NET is equally powerful with the command line. ASP.NET Core 1.0 hit RTM on June …[read more]

Configure a RunOnce task on Windows

Today was one of these days. Faced with a new problem I've never come across before. I was trying to configure a task to run once and only once on the server was provisioned for the first time. Something like a bootstrap script. In my quest to solve that problem, I came across a thing called Run and RunOnce registry keys! What are Run(Once) registry keys? Who knew that these things even existed, but here we are. So what do these keys really do? Let's grab the definition from the official documentation on [MSDN](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ …[read more]