Managing Dependencies in Azure Functions

21st of November, 2016 / / No Comments

Just before the Connect(); event, Azure Functions has become GA. Now more and more developers and IT pros are interested in it. One of the main attractions of using Azure Functions is, as a developer using C# codes, we can directly import existing private assemblies into Functions. In other words, we can easily migrate our existing applications to Azure Functions with minimal changes!
However, as we all know, migration is not that easy, especially if a huge architectural change is required.… [Keep reading] “Managing Dependencies in Azure Functions”

Deserialising .NET Core Configuration Settings

28th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

With System.Configuration.dll, we can add custom configSections into either App.config or Web.config files so that we can utilise strongly-typed configuration objects. On the other hand, .NET Core applications have replaced those App.config or Web.config with appsettings.json, which is more convenient for developers to use, especially for dependency injection (DI). In this post, we are going to walkthrough how we can deserialise the appsettings.json for DI purpose.

Basics

When we create an ASP.NET Core web application, we have a basic appsettings.json… [Keep reading] “Deserialising .NET Core Configuration Settings”

Testing Azure Functions in Emulated Environment with ScriptCs

5th of September, 2016 / / 2 Comments

In the previous post, Azure Functions Deployment Strategies, we have briefly looked several ways to deploy Azure Functions codes. In this post, I’m going to walk through how we can test Azure Functions codes on developers’ local machine.

Mocking and Asserting on ScriptCs

We need to know how to run test code scripts using ScriptCs. We’re not going too much details how to install ScriptCs here. Instead, we assume that we have ScriptCs installed on our local machine.… [Keep reading] “Testing Azure Functions in Emulated Environment with ScriptCs”

Azure Functions Deployment Strategies

4th of September, 2016 / / 9 Comments

As a serverless architecture, Azure Functions gives us a great benefit, ie. we don’t have to worry about server maintenance. However, we still need to manage our codes and setup a proper strategy for deployment. In this post, I am going to describe list of deployment strategies for Azure Functions.

Git Integration

Azure Functions provides a git integration as an out-of-the-box feature. We can simply integrate local git repository, GitHub, BitBucket or Visual Studio Team Service.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Deployment Strategies”

Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser

1st of September, 2016 / / 15 Comments

I am lucky enough to have a play around HoloLens at my office. One of the interests around HoloLens might be how to share what the user wearing HoloLens is actually viewing. In this post, I am going to briefly describe how to setup streaming video from HoloLens to your web browser.

Activating Developer Mode and Device Portal

First of all, Developer Mode in HoloLens must be activated. This is the actual screen the HoloLens user can see.… [Keep reading] “Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser”

Passing Parameters to Linked ARM Templates

8th of August, 2016 / / 4 Comments

Recently, my workmate Vic wrote some great posts regarding to Azure Linked Templates. This is, a supplementary post to his ones, to show how to share parameters across the linked templates.

Scripts and templates used in this post can be found at: https://github.com/devkimchi/Linked-ARM-Templates-Sample

parametersLink and parameters Properties

We have a master template, master-deployment.json, and it looks like:

Each nested template has a parameter called environment that has the same value as the one in the master template.… [Keep reading] “Passing Parameters to Linked ARM Templates”

Continuous Deployment on Visual Studio Team Services for .NET Core Applications

30th of July, 2016 / / 4 Comments

This post is going to talk about continuous deployment on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for .NET Core applications. With VSTS, we can manage projects, codes, builds, tests, and releases. However, it doesn’t fully support .NET Core applications at the time of this writing. More specifically, all necessary environment has been ready but the official build steps by Microsoft are not ready. Therefore, we’re writing our own PowerShell scripts for both continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), and integrate them with VSTS build/release pipelines.… [Keep reading] “Continuous Deployment on Visual Studio Team Services for .NET Core Applications”

Effective Error Handling in PowerShell Scripting

24th of July, 2016 / / 6 Comments

There are two typical cases we meet almost everyday while writing PowerShell scripts. Seeing red-coloured error messages is the one and number of result messages displayed on the screen is the other. Have you ever thought you wanted to see nothing or, at least, minimise those messages? In this post, we are going to run a few tricks not to see those error (or unwanted) messages for your happy PowerShell scripting.

Hiding Execution Messages

By design, PowerShell shows result messages after running cmdlets.… [Keep reading] “Effective Error Handling in PowerShell Scripting”

Code Management in Serverless Computing – AWS Lambda and Azure Functions

2nd of July, 2016 / / 6 Comments

In the Serverless world, we don’t need to setup server. We just take care of codes (called functions). However, one of the major drawbacks of the current FaaS (Function as a Service) providers in the Serverless world is they support lack of code management features. In this post, we’ll compare both AWS Lambda (Lambda) and Azure Functions (Functions) in regards to the source code management.

AWS Lambda

Lambda doesn’t natively support code management.… [Keep reading] “Code Management in Serverless Computing – AWS Lambda and Azure Functions”

Creating Web Tests for Application Insights Programmatically

22nd of June, 2016 / / 3 Comments

Azure SDK for .NET provides very useful features to deal with Azure services and resources including Application Insights. With this SDK, we can easily create or update resources for Application Insights and alerts. However, surprisingly this SDK doesn’t provide creating Web Tests resources to check availability. In this post, we will walk through how to create web tests programmatically using C# codes.

Web Tests in Azure Portal

Once an Application Insights instance is created in Azure Portal, we can easily create web tests by following this post, Monitor availability and responsiveness of any web site.… [Keep reading] “Creating Web Tests for Application Insights Programmatically”