Integration Tests in Azure Pipelines with ASP.Net Core and SQL on Docker

• April 17, 2019

I usually like to keep my application dependencies such as the database, and emulators packaged in containers. Running the dependencies in containers gives me the ability to keep my development process fluid as I can bring up the dependencies to the desired state no matter how massively I deform them. In my CI pipelines, I enforce the execution of unit tests and integration tests on every build. Usually, running integration tests involve running test cases along with the dependency, which is a database most of the time.

Appropriately Release Resources From DotNet Core Application Deployed in Kubernetes Cluster

• September 8, 2018

You have deployed your DNC (Dot Net Core) application on your Kubernetes cluster and to make it efficient, you have initialized resources, kept a database channel open, and did a ton of other things during the initialization of your application. Did you miss something? One of the critical tasks that you must do is cleaning up the resources, shutting down the open channels, and gracefully shutting off what you turned on and so on from your application when Kubernetes instructs your container to shut down.

Count Online Users with Azure SignalR Service

• August 1, 2018

I have been following Dino Esposito’s SignalR series from the last few MSDN Magazine editions. In the May edition of the Magazine, Dino talked about the subtle details of ASP.Net Core SignalR. It is an excellent read, and it covers the topic in a much better and concise manner than I will ever be able to describe. In his latest article, Dino discussed the various use cases of SignalR. If you have been watching the Azure space closely, then you must have noticed that a new service named Azure SignalR Service joined the Azure family.

Add DevOps To Your Existing Dockerized Applications With Azure DevOps Projects

• July 26, 2018

As a cloud developer, the current offering to add support for DevOps (CI\CD) to an application always felt less optimal to me. In VSTS, tasks such as creating CI and CD workflows, linking the pipelines with code repository, and adding monitoring take a little time even though the quick start templates have considerably optimized the process. A new offering from Azure named Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects fills this gap in the DevOps offering.

Delivering IoT Mixed Reality Applications using The MSF Process Model (Develop, Stabilize, and Deploy) – Part 3

• July 14, 2018

In this series Envision and Plan Develop and Stabilize Develop, Stabilize, and Deploy This is the final article in this series of building MR IoT applications using the MSF Process Model. If you have landed on this post directly, I recommend that you go through these posts in the order in which they are mentioned. Part 1: Where we discussed an overview of the MSF and the Envisioning and Planning phases of delivering the solution.

Delivering IoT Mixed Reality Applications using The MSF Process Model (Develop and Stabilize) – Part 2

• July 3, 2018

In this series Envision and Plan Develop and Stabilize Develop, Stabilize, and Deploy In the previous article, we went through the Envisioning and Planning phases for delivering a Mixed Reality IoT application. In this article, we will start building the components of the architecture that we developed in the previous phase. Since we have a clear objective with all the plans laid out, let’s kick off the development phase.

Delivering IoT Mixed Reality Applications using The MSF Process Model (Envision and Plan) – Part 1

• June 24, 2018

In this series Envision and Plan Develop and Stabilize Develop, Stabilize, and Deploy Delivery of enterprise scale projects requires a cohesive and structured framework in place. A robust delivery framework ensures that projects are carefully planned, and roles and tasks are identified and defined. Microsoft has developed a set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, and guidelines for delivering information technology services known as Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF).

Building Zero Code Cosmos DB Proxy with Azure Functions

• May 9, 2018

Using Azure Functions, you can free your projects from Cosmos DB API dependency. In this article, we will build a simple API using Azure Functions that interacts with Cosmos DB without requiring you to write any code. You have multiple options for building Azure Functions. You can write functions using Visual Studio tooling, or you can build one using VS Code with Azure CLI. However, for this demo, I will use the Azure Portal inbuilt function editor.

Building Applications with Azure IoT Edge

• April 25, 2018

I recently presented a session on building applications with Azure IoT Edge at the Global Azure Bootcamp, Sydney. In the field of IoT, edge analytics is not just important; it is a necessity. Azure IoT Edge solves a lot of edge analytics challenges in a unique manner that many organizations face. Azure IoT Edge brings the power of essential cloud services from the cloud to your on-premise devices. You can deploy either Azure service logic or your code to devices from the cloud interface without physically accessing the device.

Building and Testing Reactive Microservices in Azure with Event Grid, Azure Functions, and Ngrok

• April 12, 2018

According to the Reactive Manifesto, a reactive system should have some essential characteristics which include: responsiveness, resiliency, elasticity, and being message-driven. Out of all the aspects, the most significant differentiating factor of Reactive Microservices from others is its characteristic of being message-driven. Using messages as the glue that holds your Microservices application together, you can design systems that isolated. High degree of isolation also helps enhance the scalability of a system which is an essential aspect of a Microservices application.

Visualize Performance of Your Bots With The Ibex Dashboard

• February 12, 2018

I recently finished building a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework for a major client. One of the standard requirement of the clients that develop Bot applications is to have bot-specific monitoring in place. Managing the bot that you have built involves adding monitoring and management capabilities to it. Adding monitoring and management aspects to your bot ensures that your bot implementation will be successful in the long run.

Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework - Part 5

• November 10, 2017

In this series Introduction Adding Dialogs and State to your bot Using Form Flow Adding intelligence to your bot using LUIS Publishing your bot Welcome to the final post in my series of blogs on Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework. Till now we were building our bot and adding features to it. In this article, we will be publishing our bot and later chat with our bot on Skype.

Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework - Part 4

• October 22, 2017

In this series Introduction Adding Dialogs and State to your bot Using Form Flow Adding intelligence to your bot using LUIS Publishing your bot Welcome to the fourth post in my blog series on Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework. In this article, we will see how we can configure LUIS to bring Natural Language Processing capabilities to our application. LUIS uses Intents, Entities, and Utterances to build its NLP models.

Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework - Part 3

• September 14, 2017

In this series Introduction Adding Dialogs and State to your bot Using Form Flow Adding intelligence to your bot using LUIS Publishing your bot Welcome to the third post in my blog series on Building Bots with The Microsoft Bot Framework. In the last post, we saw how we could use Dialogs and State to carry out a meaningful conversation with the user. However, we also saw that interacting with the user using Dialogs involves a lot of complexity.

Now Available: Microservices with Azure

• July 7, 2017

It has been months since my friend Namit and I have been working on bringing to life a comprehensive book on Microservices applications specifically targeted for deployment in the cloud. We realized how the community is too keen to get started with Microservices, but there is so little guidance available on the subject. We studied several real-world implementations and documented the learnings as a set of patterns that help solve some of the most common challenges architects face while designing Microservices applications.