Query Profiling on Azure SQL

[Azure SQL](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/?v=16.50" target="_blank) is one of the most valuable Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings on Azure, second only to Web Apps. It's incredibly cost effective and fully featured. It supports a number of database versions and can be deployed in seconds. The other day I was looking to test something with EF Core and I needed a database to run queries against. I went to the Azure portal, I created a database with prepopulated data using the AdventureWorks (Datawarehouse Workload - DW) and I was ready …[read more]

Deploying your code to production doesn't have to hurt

This blog post is at the back of a conversation I had on Twitter with a few people about how (not) to deploy code to an environment. It all started after reading a blog post by Jesse Liberty with the title Azure For Developers – Part 3: Deploying from Visual Studio. I have huge respect for Jesse and I know he's been around for much longer than I've been. However, I felt that he omitted something very important from his blog post. The fact that although deploying from Visual Studio works great and is super convenient, this is something that should …[read more]

Azure Functions, Node.js and Environment Variables

Another fun project (yes another one) using 2 of my favourite frameworks: serverless with [Azure Functions](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-reference-node" target="_blank) and Node.js. I'm developing locally using the [Azure Functions Core Tools](https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-functions-core-tools" target="_blank) (former CLI) and [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/" target="_blank). 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 …[read more]

Deploy your ASP.NET Core app to Azure Service Fabric

[Service Fabric](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/" target="_blank) 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 …[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](https://web-academy.com.ua/feconf2017/" target="_blank), 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](https://code.visualstudio.com/" target="_blank). 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 …[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](https://code.visualstudio.com/" target="_blank) (VS Code) provides excellent integration with [Application Insights (AI)](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/" target="_blank). 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 …[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]