Updating SQL Azure database using Visual Studio database project and Azure DevOps

Visual Studio database projects have been one of my important tools since Visual Studio 2010. Database projects were not easy to use with build servers ten years ago. Today things are different. It’s super easy to use database projects to update staging and live databases from Azure build and release pipelines. This blog post shows how to do it.

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Creating storage accounts and blob containers using Azure fluent API-s

Using Azure fluent API-s it is easy to create storage accounts and blob containers. After experimenting with fluent API of Azure storage I found it to be good match for multitenant web applications where tenant files are held on Azure blob storage. I was surprised how clean and short code I got using fluent API. Here’s my overview of fluent API for Azure storage with some code samples I wrote.

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Implementing repository querying interface in EF Core DbContext

My last bold statement was that we don’t need custom unit of work and repository classes with Entity Framework Core. One issue remained unsolved and it was querying part of repositories (yeah, those custom querying methods). After some experiments to get querying interface of repositories to DbContext I worked out something that I kind of like. I managed to make DbContext to work like classic unit of work that hosts repository instances. Here’s my experiment and the solution I worked out.

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Building experimental hybrid Blazor WebAssembly application

After getting done with Blazor desktop applications I tried to build kind of hybrid Blazor WebAssembly application that can run on desktop and in web equally. Although I failed to make it as one single application, I still got it work with a little different architecture. And what’s best – Blazor desktop applications run already now as self-contained executables. Here’s my experiment.

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Exploring WebWindow examples for Blazor on desktop

Blazor on desktop is one of latest hot topics and .NET Conf: Focus on Blazor only added more fuel to fire. Blazor seems to come everywhere and it’s unstoppable. One of interesting desktop experiments is WebWindow by Steve Sanderson. It’s cross-platform component to make Blazor WebAssembly applications run on desktop. Let’s take a closer look at WebWindow and Blazor on desktop.

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Start with Surface Duo development on preview emulator and SDK today

Surface Neo and Surface Duo are new devices by Microsoft, planned to launch for holidays season this year. Surface Neo runs Windows and Surface Duo is based on Android. For Surface Duo there’s already preview tooling and SDK available by Microsoft. Here’s the introduction to Surface Duo development, tools and patterns.

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Creating subdomains to Azure DNS from ASP.NET Core

Multitenant wep applications detect current tenant usually by URL checking name of first level folder or subdomain. Usually tenants are defined by subdomain as it is easier to distribute them over data center, cloud services or hosting accounts. This blog post demonstrates how to build Azure DNS service client to create DNS records for multitenant application subdomains.

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Inject users and roles dynamically to ASP.NET Core integration tests

After getting fake authenticated user to ASP.NET Core integration tests I made step further and introduced the way to use different user accounts. Using multiple users and roles instead of one test users is very common scenario in web applications. During my carreer I have seen only few business applications that doesn’t use different roles. This blog post demonstrates how to inject users dynamically to ASP.NET Core integration tests.

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Create fake user for ASP.NET Core integration tests

After getting done with fake users for ASP.NET Core controller unit tests I wanted to make fake users available also in integration tests. It took some inventing and hacking but I made it work. This blog post shows you how to create fake users for ASP.NET Core integration tests and write effective extension methods to keep integration tests shorter.

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Embedded Power BI reports with ASP.NET Core

Last year I had some projects where I had to embed Power BI reports to ASP.NET Core applications. There were easy cases that solved practically with copy-paste but I also had more complex situation where server-side code was needed because application uses custom authentication instead of Azure AD. This blog post covers both scenarios for embedding Power BI reportis to ASP.NET Core applications.

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DataSet and DataTable based ad-hoc reporting with ASP.NET Core

In one of my projects I have some ASP.NET Core views that display multiple tables with reporting data. Data comes from SQL Server views and stored procedures and these can be modified in database without deploying application to server again. I came out with very common solution in ASP.NET Core to solve this problem using raw SQL commands and shared views for DataTable and DataSet. Here’s what I did.

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