Azure Function Proxies for API Mocking

18th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

In my previous posts, Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Logic Apps and API Mocking for Developers, we have looked how to mock APIs with various approaches including Azure API Management, AWS API Gateway, MuleSoft and Azure Functions. Quite recently, Azure Functions Team released a new mocking feature in Azure Function Proxies. With this feature, API mocking can’t be even easier. In this post, I’m going to show how to use this mocking feature in several ways.… [Keep reading] “Azure Function Proxies for API Mocking”

Mobile-first development with Xamarin

18th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

 
Modern application users have high expectations for applications, even for in-house enterprise apps.  IT leaders realising this have adopted a mobile-first development approach, which ensures great user experience, reduce overall development and maintenance cost. In this post I will provide an example of a mobile-first development project for an enterprise application.
 Business case
A retailer is using Windows CE devices for performing daily tasks in it stores and is planning to move to the latest Android / iOS devices.… [Keep reading] “Mobile-first development with Xamarin”

How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Since bots are evolving, you need a mechanism to better understand what user wants from his/her language and take actions or respond to user queries appropriately. In the days of increasing automation, bots can certainly help provided they are backed by tools to understand user language both naturally and contextually.
Azure Cognitive Services has an API that can help to identify what user wants, extracts concepts and entities from a sentence (user input) using an intelligent service name Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS).… [Keep reading] “How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language”

Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell

14th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks back I was messing around with the Azure Key Vault looking to centralise a bunch of credentials for my ever-growing list of Azure Functions that are automating numerous tasks. What I found was getting an Azure Key Vault setup and getting credentials in and out was a little more cumbersome than what I thought it should be. At that same point via Twitter this tweet appeared in my timeline from a retweet.… [Keep reading] “Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
In my last blog, we configured the backend systems necessary for accomplishing the task of asking Google Home “OK Google Email me the status of all vms” and it sending us an email to that effect. If you haven’t finished doing that, please refer back to my last blog and get that done before continuing.
In this blog, we will configure Google Home.
Google Home uses Google Assistant to do all the smarts.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
Technology is evolving at a breathtaking pace. For instance, the phone in your pocket has more grunt than the desktop computers of 10 years ago!
One of the upcoming areas in Computing Science is Artificial Intelligence. What seemed science fiction in the days of Isaac Asimov, when he penned I, Robot seems closer to reality now.
Lately the market is popping up with virtual assistants from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1”

Mixing Parameters in Logic Apps with ARM Template

9th of September, 2017 / / 9 Comments

One of the most irritating moments of using Azure Logic Apps is writing a HUMONGOUS JSON object that is wrapped by an ARM template. The nature of this Logic App instance inevitably requires us to mix both ARM template expressions and Workflow Definition Language (WDL) expressions. At the time of this writing, as there is no local validation tool around those two, we never know, if the Logic App instance is correctly deployed or not, until it is deployed and run.… [Keep reading] “Mixing Parameters in Logic Apps with ARM Template”

Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor

7th of September, 2017 / / 9 Comments

Azure Queues provides an easy queuing system for cloud-based applications. Queues allow for loose coupling between application components, and applications that use queues can take advantage of features like peek-locking and multiple retry attempts to enable application resiliency and high availability. Additionally, when Azure Queues are used with Azure Functions or Azure WebJobs, the built-in poison queue support allows for messages that repeatedly fail processing attempts to be moved to a dedicated queue for later inspection.… [Keep reading] “Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor”

Configuring Remote PowerShell to a Remote Active Directory Forest for FIM/MIM GalSync

7th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

Windows Remote Management (aka Remote PowerShell) is a wonderful thing; when it works straight out of the box when you’re in the same domain. Getting it working across Forests though can feel like jumping through hoop after hoop, and sometimes like the hoops are on fire.  When configuring GALSync ([Exchange] Global Address List Synchronisation) with FIM/MIM this always means across AD Forests. The graphic below shows the simplest relationship. If there is a firewall(s) in between then you’ll have additional hoops to jump through.… [Keep reading] “Configuring Remote PowerShell to a Remote Active Directory Forest for FIM/MIM GalSync”

Make Your Azure WebJobs Unit Testable Again

6th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

In my previous posts, we had a look at testability for serverless applications. In this post, we’re going to apply a similar approach to Azure WebJobs.

The sample code used in this post can be found here.

For either scheduled WebJob instance or on-demand WebJob instance, it’s just a console application that we’re not dealing with. However, when we look at the continuous running WebJob instance, it will be a different story. Let’s have a look at the basic WebJob code.… [Keep reading] “Make Your Azure WebJobs Unit Testable Again”