Blogs

I work a lot with Azure and Azure DevOps and just for the record, I still love Azure DevOps! Even though I don’t think Azure DevOps will suddenly disappear. I do think the future is in GitHub. I was asked to host a workshop about GitHub and Azure for a group of professionals. This made me do a lot of comparisons between Azure DevOps and GitHub from the non-open-source perspective. One of the topics really made me want to write a post, maybe I’m a bit weird to get excited about this but I just love the GitHub OIDC option to deploy to Azure....

I was preparing a talk called Azure Static Web Apps and the Api Multiverse in which I wanted to hook up external apis instead of the managed functions. The first thing I wanted to do is have a front-end that I could deploy that calls some kind of api on the backend. I did not want to create the Static Web App ’the magic way’ but I wanted to start with IaC, so for this I created a bicep file....

In my job I work with multiple teams that next to ‘regular’ developers also include Test Automation experts. It is very common to see them using a tool like Selenium. A while ago one of the teams needed to reboot a part of their project and we decided to start fresh. Fresh and clean I remembered seeing a Playwright demo and we started to investigate if it was something for us....

The new Azure Functions Isolated Process Model is a bit different than the one you might be used to. If you are not familiar with the new model you should first read this: 2021-03-27 Azure Functions in .NET 5 and beyond In the new isolated model the output binding for a simple http function is similar to the old class library model, the return value of your method is the http response....

In November of 2020 .NET 5 got released, the promise of “one-dotnet”. The ‘core’ addition has been dropped and Full Framework evolution has stopped at the 4.8 version. This does not mean Full Framework support ends, this is tied to the support of windows therefore you can expect an eternity of patches. But when you are building something new now you should use .NET 5 or .NET core 3.1 because of its long term support....

It looks like the world is changing faster than ever before, disrupting start-ups come from nowhere and challenge big companies. Technology provides connectivity as never before and the possibilities seem endless. This year the world got challenged like never before and we are using technology to overcome issues in our daily life that would not have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago. In the past decade I have talked to a lot of development teams, CTOs and decision makers about the cloud, mainly Azure....

Azure App configuration is an amazing service that we have been using in our project to centralize our configuration. If you are unfamiliar with the service I suggest reading Azure App Configuration: an introduction by @rickvdbosch. We were really happy to move our apis to App Configuration in combination with Azure Key Vault references, this meant that we centralized our configuration, removed duplication and pushed all the secrets to Azure Key Vault....

How I ended up having a Saturday night date with the Azure DevOps marketplace. ‘At some moment we should really fix this!’ Is this something you and your team sometimes say? We had one of those, we are building really cool software at Virtual Vaults using Dotnet Core, Angular and all the Azure toys. We use Azure DevOps and have a lot of common NuGet packages that we share internally using the Artefacts Feed....

Creating a large application and exposing it to the web has a lot of challenges. You will have to think about performance, security, reliability. You are probably not Netflix but you might have an application that is: composed out of different (micro)services highly available and fast from anywhere on the globe needs specific routing rules for something (a-b testing?) Azure Front Door Service There are a lot of different solutions that might solve your routing puzzle, but in this blog we will dive into the capabilities of “Azure Front Door Service” (from here FDS because I’m lazy)....

The software your team builds relies on a lot of code that is written by people outside your organisation. Are you paying them or thanking them even? Building software changes all the time, for me it started with writing desktop apps that you would put on a floppy for someone to use. More than 20 years later I am working with a team at Virtual Vaults building SAAS by using PAAS and all the serverless goodies in Azure....