Architect
A while a go I was working on a spreadsheet style applicaiton for the web, and we needed a method to store the 2 dimentional data in a 1 deminentional database. This was the resultant database structure, which is a linked list, which allowed both data and formula’s to included. There was either a template structure so you could load predefined sheets. I’ll get round to recreating the web page…. eventually.
This started out as a google project, hence the ‘g’, but the gRPC community is keen to distance itself from that. gRPC is quickly becoming a standard that getting wide adoption across the industry.
Loqate is a service which supplies addresses and geocoding for a given search string. The Loqate service employs a iterative id base system where by, if you supply the id to subsequent calls then you will get narrower results. When you receive a result of type ‘Address’ then you can call Loqate’s Retrieve api call to get that items address details.
When you use shared access signatures in your applications, you need to be aware of two potential risks:
Documentation is task that is best shared among all the relevant people, each supplying enough information that satisfies there understanding of the issue.
<iframe src="https://www.w3schools.com"></iframe>Fluent Assertions is a helper library for testing that tries to add better context to your assertions.
Azure functions has always been missing the startup sequence enjoyed by other .net core applications. DI is now a first class member and the above post by microsoft explains whats needed well.
KeyVault is a central resource where you should be storing all of your applications secrets/connection strings and config. The reason for using KeyVault rather than using a local config file, is really quite simple. config files dont exist for most azure artefacts, and if they did, it would encourage the sort of key management that has plagued .NET since day one. By using the KeyVault in this way means that the application code doesn’t need to know anything about the environment or its configuration. The build process should inject any secrets into the parameters file, which the ARM Template deployment consumes and deploys.
By default storage accounts are encrypted, and Microsoft holds the keys. The encryption that is used is AES 256 bit, as it is one of the strongest ciphers currently available.
The blob container resource is a sub-resource of the storage account. When you create a storage account, you can now specify an array of storages resources. We are then going to specify objects of type “blobServices/containers”, and make sure to use an API version of 2018-02-01 or later. In the example below, we are creating a storage account with two containers.
To convert certificate that is in .pfx to base64 format in PowerShell, you can use .NET namespace available in PowerShell to convert. I had a scenario where I was required to use base64 encoding to upload certificate to Azure to secure communication to backend instance. Since Microsoft Azure provides rich API to work with. I was able to make a patch request and push certificate to Azure. In this tutorial, I will show you how to convert certificate from .pfx to base64. Open PowerShell as an administrator. Now that we have PowerShell console opened. Let’s first load the content into a variable.
| [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($pfxFileBytes) | Out-File ‘PfxFileBytes-Base64.txt’ |
For a full description of WOPI, please follow the link to the project. WOPI Project
I’m always looking for ways to simply automate deployments, so I don’t have to hard code, or repeat myself. This blog is looking at Key Vault deployments, and its use.
I found a good resource, so I can include bot C4 diagrams and Azure icons within a PlantUML diagram. I’ve done C4 within PlantUml before but it was a bit crude.
PlantUML is not directly supported by GitHub, but its still possible. Basically we pass your puml file to PlantUML to generate, and they return a PNG which gets included in the page
For something so simple, arm templates can become complex things, so I prefer to try to set some ground rules before I go to deep. N.B this works for me, and may not suit everyone 😉
Well. Finally got around to putting this old website together. Neat thing about it - powered by Jekyll and I can use Markdown to author my posts. It actually is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be.
For something so simple, arm templates can become complex things, so I prefer to try to set some ground rules before I go to deep.
Microsoft announced that you can now enable static websites on a storage account. This will generate a new URL for your site, and enable read access to any static html files within the blob storage. There’s a link to Microsoft’s preview announcement here. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-storage-static-web-hosting-public-preview/
Each component is a separately deploy-able artefact, but we need a coherent single URL to link them all. The normal method would be to deploy out each individual component to Azure and each would get its own ‘aurewebsites.com’ URL. This approach would lead to confusion, as it would mean you would need to keep lists of URL’s By using the proxy feature of Azure Functions we can define routes to each of the installed artefacts while preserving a single URL for the application. So:-