Good Monday, it's time to share new readingnotes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
The suggestion of the week
Deploy Azure Static Web Apps With Bicep | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a well-structured deployment pipeline using bicep and GitHub action. I will need this for sure, bookmarked.
ApiController Attribute in ASP.NET Core Web API (Code Maze) - This post contained many best practices and detailed explanations to get a great API and make sure the user experience is the best possible.
New Resources to Get Started with .NET MAUI - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup) - Are you planning to learn something new this summer? I suggest you .NET MAUI, to build an application that can go everywhere. This post shares tons of references to get you started.
Yes I know one day later, but it's still time to share my reading notes.
Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Cloud
50 shades of .NET on AWS (François Bouteruche) - A nice, like-real, story that helps understand how decisions are taken when planning in cloud architecture (here AWS).
Development Container CLI (Brigit Murtaugh) - Oh! This is fantastique, I need to try that, I'm assuming we will be able to give a name to the instance and that it will make reopening a container easier.
The Azure Cosmos DB Journey to .NET 6 - .NET Blog (Vinod Sridharan) - Learn how Azure Cosmo DB API gateway is low latency and use .Net in many different scenarios to achieve great performance, in this post.
It's Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Configure Azure Cosmos DB Continuous Backups (Rajendra Gupta) - Backup can be so powerful! You could return in time just before an error to understand what happens... Or so many other scenarios.
How To Run PowerShell Scripts (Brien Posey) - A script can be frightening at first, but this nice post will help you to understand them better. Perfect for less technical people.
Introducing Qodana for Azure Pipelines (Anastasia Khramushina) - Qodana is can analyze your code in CICD on many platforms, and now also in the Azure DevOps.
Good Monday, already time to share new reading notes.
It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Azure Cosmos DB SQL API – Document Analytics (Modhana) - Finding a good partition for our data is crucial to get the best performance. This post explains how with Celebrata we can visualize them and make smarter choices.
Miscellaneous
No one cares that you’re right (George Stocker) - Interesting post. the comparison of a compiler to humans made me smile, but it works...
Recently I participated in a series of videos about Azure Static Web Apps: Azure Tips and Tricks: Static Web Apps on Microsoft Channel 9. The series is perfect to get started and cover multiple different scenarios in different Javascript frameworks and C#. In this post, I wanted to regroup the four videos related to .Net Blazor. I also added the GitHub links part of the references at to end.
Prevent unwanted users to access your C# API by configuring authentication and authorization in your Blazor Azure Static Web Apps.
I hope those videos will help you to get started. If you have questions and/or comments don't hesitate to reach out (comments, DM, GitHub issues), it's always a pleasure.
In this video, I wanted to show one of the great features of Azure Static Web App Learn: the creation of pre-production environments. Using the CI/CD workflow, you can preview your pull requests changes before it's in production leveraging the automatic creation of pre-production environments!
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Cloud
How to Display the Current Azure Subscription in your CLI (Sam Cogan) - This is a game-changer for me. Every time I work in the terminal I was checking what was my current subscription (you don't want to deploy things in the wrong one right?) But know it will always be visible. Wonderfull!
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Installing Docker Desktop for Windows and WSL 2 (Andrew Lock) - This post guides ys in the installations of WLS2 with Docker on Windows. It is now kind of simple... But a lot of us are still afraid. We shouldn't, give it a try!
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
Épisode 11 - La famine en Ukraine (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - OMG! I have nothing else to say. I knew that part of the history was dark and complex... but I knew nothing. Great episode.
Containers on Azure with Tom Kerkhove (.NET Rocks!) - What a great episode! And it's so true there is so many ways "to do your containers" ( like in a recipe )
Épisode 87 - La sécurité des coureuses (Grand écart) - Sometimes I feel so ashamed to be a man... I know I'm doing it right, but I need to do more... for the others that forgot that we are all equal.
633 - How to Use Rejection to Your Advantage (Modern Mentor) - In our lives, we will encounter many nos or rejection. This episode talks about how you could use those detours to learn more, and transform them in opportunities.
101: Windows Virtual Desktop with Travis Roberts (CloudSkills.fm) - I remember when "infra" people couldn't see anything positive about the cloud... Times as changed a lot. There are so many opportunities.
The myth of turning your hobby into a job with writer Aley Arion (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Is it a myth or a reality? I totally think it's possible. But yeah in all the amazing love (or adventure) movies there are always some challenges. But happy 95% of the time.. I take that!
Getting Started With NuGet 5.8 (Jon Douglas) - A very interesting post about the new features included in NuGet, and since it is the first one supporting .Net 5, some advice for a better experience.
What is a Developer Game Jam? (Coding Blocks) - Interesting episode about Game Jam... I barely know that universe. Yes, I said universe because it is a completely different world or better another dimension. There are tons of events and participants but you may never hear of that. It's very interesting.
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Creating a .NET Core Global Tool (John Smith) - Cool project. It gave me ideas of little things I would like to have available...
How to Docker with .NET: Getting Started (Dave Brock) - A truly beginner tutorial. If you know about Docker but never did really play with it, here is your chance. First post of a trilogy that definitely worth our time.
Learn Node.js with this series of short videos for beginners (Microsoft) - An amazing series of tiny videos. I started myself and already learned so much! Perfect bite-size to watch in a break, or to find THE topic/ answer you are looking for.
Great book. I wasn't sure first but someone recommended it and since, I like her first book and thought why not! I was not disappointed. I like this journey through interviews. Each person (yes real person, not characters), is great; full of emotions, victory, fails... like us, well me at least.
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
6 Tools I use for Web Development (Jakob Klamser) - A nice list of great tools. I'm surprised to read that notion would be more flexible then OneNote, I heard a lot of good from it but never tried it.
Every beginning of weekend, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful. Watch only the summary or relax and enjoy the longer version that up to you!
Coding Python: Deploy Django and Postgres Apps to Azure with VS Code - c5m.ca/aaa-ep25
Stream 119 - How easy can we make the deployment of TinyBlazorAdmin - c5m.ca/stream-ep119
Stream120 - Celebrating 500 followers and working on the Chat bot - c5m.ca/stream-ep120
211: Failure To Launch (Merge Conflict) - Interesting conversation about when it's time to stop adding features and deploy. Finding a comfortable point could be difficult sometime.
Remote Debugging .NET Containers (Karol Deland) - A nice tutorial that explains clearly first the difference between remote and local debugging and then explains how to do it.
Screen Sharing with an Ultrawide Monitor (Kenny Lowe) - Really interesting post.As I think about getting a new screen and heard bad experiences sharing ultrawide screens this look like a nice solution.
An interesting book that shares the best practices about making videos today. How to plan, record, edit... What to do and not do. A quick, direct to the point and complete tutorial to get started. This book was done like today's videos.
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. As you will quickly see This week is heavily tinted by the Microsoft Build event. I still have tons of videos to watch since I was was busy monitoring the chat during most of the performances.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Chocolatey with Rob Reynolds (.NET Rocks!) - Awesome episode talking about all the good and the great of Chocolatey that awesome package manager.
A path to technical leadership with Keavy McMinn (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Because the most interesting path are more then often not the straight one... Great talk about the choice we make in our lives...
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have interesting content, share it!
070: Securing DevOps in the Cloud (CloudSkills.fm) - Great episode talking about security yes but also best practices and to change mindsets. Love it.
Running a successful dev shop with Martin Gratzer (Software Engineering Unlocked) - This show is one of my new favorites. Always interesting and very dynamic. This time it was about the hard reality of "dev shop". Very interesting, so true!
The Overreaction Paradox (Developer Tea) - I never thought about it that way... But it's so true. Are we celebrating the wrong things?
197: I Need a Website (Merge Conflict) - They got me 50% of the time... I think they are talking to me: 'Frank we are ....'. Nice episode sharing some dreams about a perfect tool (aka website) for apps developers.
Most solutions, if not all, are composed of multiple parts: backend, frontend, services, APIs, etc. Because all parts could have a different life-cycle it's important to be able to deploy them individually. However, sometimes we would like to deploy everything at once. It's exactly the scenario I had in a project I'm working on where with backend and one frontend.
In this post, I will explain how I use nested Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and conditions to let the user decide if he wants to deploy only the backend or the backend with a frontend of his choice. All the code will be available in GitHub and if you prefer, a video version is available below. (This post is also available in French)
The Context
The project used in this post my open-source budget-friendly Azure URL Shortener. Like mentioned previously the project is composed of two parts. The backend leverage Microsoft serverless Azure Functions, it a perfect match in this case because it will only run when someone clicks a link. The second part is a frontend, and it's totally optional. Because the Azure Functions are HTTP triggers they act as an API, therefore, they can be called from anything able to do an HTTP call. Both are very easily deployable using an ARM template by a PowerShell or CLI command or by a one-click button directly from GitHub.
The Goal
At the end of this post, we will be able from one-click to deploy just the Azure Functions or to deploy them with a frontend of our choice (I only have one right now, but more will come). To do this, we will modify the "backend" ARM template using condition and nest the ARM template responsible for the frontend deployment.
The ARM templates are available here in there [initial](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before) and [final](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before/after) versions.
Adding New Inputs
We will nest the ARM templates, this means that our backend template (azureDeploy.json) will call the frontend template (adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json). Therefore we need to add all the required information to azureDeploy.json to make sure it's able to deploy adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json successfully. Looking at the parameter required for the second template, we only two need values AdminEMail and AdminPassword. All the other can be generated or we already have them.
We will need also another parameter the will act as our selection option. So let's add a parameter named frontend and allowed only two values: none and adminBlazorWebsite. If the value is none we only deploy the Azure Function. When the value is adminBlazorWebsite we will deploy the Azure Function, of course, but we will also deploy an admin website to go with it.
Following the best practices, we add clear detail and add those three parameters in the parameters section of the ARM template
"frontend": {
"type": "string",
"allowedValues": [
"none",
"adminBlazorWebsite"
],
"defaultValue": "adminBlazorWebsite",
"metadata": {
"description": "Select the frontend that will be deploy. Select 'none', if you don't want any. Frontend available: adminBlazorWebsite, none. "
}
},
"frontend-AdminEMail": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) The EMail use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
},
"frontend-AdminPassword": {
"type": "securestring",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) Password use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
}
Nested Templates
Let's assume for now that we always deploy the website when we deploy the Azure Function, to keep things simple. What we need now is to used nested ARM template, and that when you deploy an ARM template from inside another ARM template. This is done with a Microsoft.Resources/deployments node. Let's look at the code:
If we examine this node, we have the classic: name, type, dependsOn, resourceGroup, apiVersion. Here We really want the Azure Functions to be fully deployed so we need the FunctionApp to be created AND the GitHub sync to be complete, this is why there is also a dependency on Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols.
In properties we will pass the mode as Incremental as it will leave unchanged resources that exist in the resource group but aren't specified in the template.
The second property is templateLink. This is really important as it's the URL to the other ARM template. That URI must not be a local file or a file that is only available on your local network. You must provide a URI value that downloadable as HTTP or HTTPS. In this case, it's a variable that contains the GitHub URL where the template is available.
Finally, we have the parameters, and this is how we pass the values to the second template. Let's skip those where I just pass the parameter value from the caller to the called, and focus on basename, AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl.
For basename I just add a prefix to the parameter basename received, this way the resource names will be different but we can still see the "connection". That's purely optional, you could have added this value in a parameter to azureDeploy.json, I prefer keeping the parameters a minimum as possible as I think it simplifies the deployment for the users.
Finally for AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl I needed to retrieve the URL of the Azure Function with the security token because they are secured. I do that by concatenating different parts.
Component
Value
Beginning of the URL
'https://'
Reference the Function App, return the value of hostname
Now that the second ARM template can be deployed, let's add a condition so it gets, indeed, deploy only when we desire. To do this it's very simple, we need to add a property condition.
In this case, is the value of the parameter is different then none, the nested template will be deployed. When a condition end-up being "false", the entire resource will be ignored during the deployment. How simple or complex are your conditions... that's your choice!
Bring your own machine to Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison) - Fantastic news! Before it was possible to access a powerful developer environment from our poor local devices. Now we can also access our own powerful machine from elsewhere! That's very very nice!
195: The Hanselman Machine Learning Model (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where Frank and James discuss how James could build a sentiment analysis of Hanselman tweets, is it possible or not and what would be the cost (effort, and money).
GitHub Actions with Enrico Campidoglio (.NET Rocks!) - I think it's my first .Net Show since the Pandemie. Well with was a create show that dig deeper in the GitHub Action. Loved it.
068: How to Build Your Personal Brand (CloudSkills.fm) - I really liked this episode as I did "created" my personal brand (without really realizing it ) a few years ago.
455: How to Create Great Relationships, with Colleen Bordeaux (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion with the author of the book: Am I Doing This Right?: A Philosophical Guide to Life in the Age of Overwhelm, that is now in my to read list/
I don't know for you but I share links/ URLs very often. And a lot of time it's from videos, so it needs to be short and easy to remember. Something like https://c5m.ca/project is better than a random string (aka. GUID). And this is how I started a project to build a URL Shortener. I wanted to be budget-friendly, easy to deploy and customizable.
In this post, I will share how I build it, how you can use it, and how you can help!
How I build it, with the community
This tool was build during live streams coding sessions on Twitch (all videos are in available in my YouTube archive). It's composed of two parts: a Serverless backend leveraging the Azure Function & Azure Storage, and a frontend of your choice.
The backend is composed of a few Azure Functions that act as an on-demand HTTP API. They only consume when they are called. They are in .Net Core, C# to be specific. When publishing this post, there are four functions:
UrlShortener: To create a short URL.
UrlRedirect: That's the one called when a short link is used. An Azure Function Proxy is forwarding all call to the root.
UrlClickStats: Return the statistic for a specific URL.
UrlList: Return the list of all URLs created.
All the information like long url, short url, click count are save in an Azure Storage Table.
And that's it. Super light, very cost-efficient. IF you are curious about the price I'll but references in the footnotes
The frontend could be anything that can make HTTP requests. Right now in the project, I explain how to use a tool call Postman, there is also a very simple interface done that you can easily deploy.
This simple interface is of course protected and gives you the options to see all URLs and create new ones.
How YOU can use it
All the code is available into GitHub, and it's deployable with a one-click button!
This will deploy the backend in your Azure subscription in a few minutes. If you don't own an Azure subscription already, you can create your free Azure account today.
Then you will probably want an interface to create your precious URLs. Once more in the GitHub repository, there is a List of available Admin interfaces and ready to be used. The Admin Blazor Website is currently the most friendly and can also be deployed in one-click.
How You can help and participate
Right now, there is really only one interface (and some instructions on how to use Postman to do the HTTP calls). But AzUrlShortener is an open-source project, meaning you can participate. Here some suggestions:
Build a new interface (in the language of your choice)
Improve current interface(s) with
logos
designs
Better UI 🙂
Register bugs in GitHub
Make feature request
Help with documentation/ translation
What's Next
Definitely come see the GitHub repo https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener, click those deploy buttons. On my side, I will continue to add more features and make it better. See you there!
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