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](https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core" target="_blank). 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 Core](https://www.nuget.org/packages/WindowsAzure.Storage" target="_blank)etc. It was a conscious decision as I wanted to see how the latest tooling and …[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](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/web-sites-staged-publishing" target="_blank). 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](GHOST_URL/azure-websites-testing-in-production/" target="_blank) Hot deployments that allow deployment to production with no downtime UAT testing targeting a near live environment Easy …[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]

Introducing the Serverless Framework for Azure Functions

The [Serverless Framework](https://serverless.com/framework/docs/" target="_blank) is a new Open Source initiative that allows you to deploy auto-scaling, pay-per-execution, event-driven functions to some of the biggest cloud providers. At moment it only support AWS Lamda, Azure Functions and Apache OpenWhisk. However, this list is due to grow fast so watch this space. In this post, I'll show you how to us the Serverless Framework with Azure Functions so that you can create, run and deploy Functions easily, in effect providing an alternative 'DevOps story' around Functions. Install the Serverless Framework Fire up your command …[read more]

Resolve NPM Access Denied Errors (Error: EACCES) in WSL

I came this issue (Error: EACCES) while I was trying to install an NPM package on my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It has to do with the way Node is installed on WSL so if you try to install NPM packages on the global level. To resolve this, you can remap the location that NPM modules are installed to one that you have full permission. This can easily be done by firing up you Bash window and typing the following: mkdir ~/.npm-new npm config set prefix '~/.npm-new' export PATH=~/.npm-new/bin:$PATH source ~/.profile You can now go …[read more]

Monitor Azure Web Application backups with Azure Functions

For most of your monitoring and alerting needs, [Azure Monitor](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/monitoring-and-diagnostics/monitoring-overview" target="_blank) should be the tool of choice. It's made the whole process so much easier and streamlined while, for the first time, providing management through the portal. I've already blogged about various monitoring options [here](GHOST_URL/monitoring-applications-and-infrastructure-on-azure/" target="_blank). However, there are a still few edge cases (not for long) for which Azure Monitor can't be the solution. In this instance, I needed a way to monitor and alert on failed backups on Azure Web Apps …[read more]

Deep dive into Azure Blob Storage

SimpleTalk invited me once again to write about Azure and this time the focus was on Storage. Azure Storage is a vital piece for most operations on Azure and it supports a wide variety of services such as VMs, Azure SQL Service etc. In this post, I do a deep dive into Azure Blob Storage, its different components and the various way you can interact with it. You can read all about it here: https://www.simple-talk.com/cloud/cloud-data/working-azure-blob-storage-service/ …[read more]