Enhance Integrated CI and CD in Azure Pipelines as Code With Key Utils: Binary Logger and Report Generator

• December 3, 2019

If you are using Azure DevOps for building and deploying your .NET core applications, then you should consider the following. Azure Pipelines now supports composing both the build and release stages as code. You can now combine your CI and CD pipeline definitions into a single pipeline definition that lives within the same repository as the application code. Turn on binary logging in MSBuild so that you receive exhaustive structured logs from the build process.

Origin Authentication and RBAC in Istio with Custom Identity Provider

• November 11, 2019

The concept of access control can be boiled down to two factors: authentication (AuthN) and authorization (AuthZ). While authentication determines the identity of a client based on the data presented to the identity provider (e.g., Google and Microsoft AD), authorization determines whether an authenticated principal may interact with the resource. I am not going to delve deep into the security architecture of Istio since I have covered this topic in detail in my upcoming FREE quick start guide on Istio.

Using CoreDNS to Conceal Network Identities of Services in Istio

• October 31, 2019

A crucial feature of the Istio Service Mesh is that it grants you absolute control over how you want to route traffic to a service. Each service on the Istio service mesh has a unique network identity that it receives from the underlying host, i.e., Kubernetes. For example, a service named foo provisioned in a namespace named bar will have the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) foo.bar.svc.cluster.local, which also serves as its network identity.

Save Your Precious Dev Time With Command Aliases In Windows Terminal

• September 23, 2019

Developers are always looking for ways to optimize their productivity. The latest addition that I did to improve mine was to create aliases for the most common commands that I use every day. I have entirely pivoted to using the new Windows Terminal for my day-to-day command line activities. Windows Terminal is a modern, open-source application that aggregates multiple terminals and shells such as command prompt, PowerShell, and WSL and adds features such tab support, rich text, configuration, and visual themes to them.

Continuous TeX Document Production with GitHub Actions

• July 21, 2019

Here is my little secret: My résumé lives in a private GitHub repository. I use TeX, which is a popular typesetting language, to compose my résumé. TeX helps you separate document text from formatting. Major publishers whose content and design teams work independently of each other use TeX. The content team produces content, and the design team makes the content presentable. In a typical publishing workflow, the author marks the various parts of content such as headers, and footers with inbuilt, or custom TeX commands.

IoT Edge Device Monitoring and Management with Azure Durable Entities Functions - Part 2

• July 13, 2019

In this series IoT Edge Application Azure Durable Entities Function In the last article, we built and tested a simple IoT Edge application that simulates temperature telemetry based on the command that it receives. We also created a test client that can invoke Direct Method on the device. Today we will build monitoring and management capabilities for our IoT Edge device using Azure Functions. One critical consideration that I would like to bring to your attention is the demand for this solution to stay mostly connected.

IoT Edge Device Monitoring and Management with Azure Durable Entities Functions - Part 1

• July 1, 2019

In this series IoT Edge Application Azure Durable Entities Function IoT systems involve many devices, each of which maintains a small internal state. The Actor Model is a good fit for representing IoT devices in the cloud because of its inherent fault tolerance, concurrency controls, performance, and scalability. I wrote about the Actor Model and Orleans (virtual actor based implementation) in one of my previous articles here.

Building a GraphQL Application with ASP.Net Core and TypeScript - Part 2

• May 19, 2019

In this series Building a GraphQL server Building a GraphQL client In the first part of this series, we discussed steps to develop a GraphQL server using ASP.Net core. Since we have a server up and running now, we will build a client that works with the API we just created. We will build a minimal client using TypeScript that has no dependency on frameworks or libraries such as Angular and React.

Building a GraphQL Application with ASP.Net Core and TypeScript - Part 1

• May 4, 2019

In this series Building a GraphQL server Building a GraphQL client GraphQL (QL: Query Language) is a query language for your APIs. For a long time API clients have been dictated the format of data that they can receive from the backend API. For example, if a client sends a GET request to this endpoint: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json (see developer guide), it will get all the data in the format dictated by the API which the client will then have to filter to get just the desired field/s, e.

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.