Azure

Azure Functions supports functions that are invoked by HTTP request. It makes it easy to have some scripted functionalities on cloud that we can invoke by simple HTTP request. This blog post shows how to build and run HTTP-triggered Azure Functions using Visual Studio.

Azure Active Directory is cloud-based directory service that allows users to use their personal or corporate accounts to log-in to different applications. Local Active Directory can sync data to its cloud counterpart. Also external users are supported. This blog post shows how to make ASP.NET Core application use Azure AD and how to read data that Azure AD provides about user account.

Azure Functions is serverless computing offer by Microsoft. Functions by Microsoft implementation are scripts that can be written in JavaScript, C#, F#, Python, PHP, Bash, Batch or PowerShell. Functions can be developed on Visual Studio using preview level tools or directly through browser in Azure portal. This blog post introduces Azure Functions and shows how to build your first function.

This blog post is about how to really precompile ASP.NET MVC views. It destroys the myth about MvcBuildViews as precompilation tool and shows you how to configure precompiling. It also stops on some internals of precompiling and explains what are the options and limitations with it. There is also real-life example for Azure where precompiling of views may avoid some serious headaches that one may face otherwise.

Search is important feature of many apps and web sites because it is the main way for users to find quickly the information they are looking for. Typing search keywords to search box is not the end point of search we can provide to users. Sites that have huge amount of data can also help users to find out what keywords to use. In this post I will show how to use Azure Search suggesters to help users to find out these keywords.

In my last blog post about REST-clients Why Azure REST API-s and how to prepare for using them? I introduced how to write simple base class for Azure REST API-s. In this post we will implement simple REST-client for Azure Search. This is the same code that I’m using in my beer store sample application. I also make some notes about how to use search clients in domain models.

When new Microsoft Azure services come they usually have REST API-s available. Of course, there are usually client libraries available too as NuGet packages but usually not for every .NET flavour. Although Microsoft has plans to publish libraries for CoreCLR too it doesn’t happen always fast. Let’s see how REST API-s work and how to prepare for using them.

Planning for search is mandatory first step when starting building search index. If we build search indices as we go we easily end up with messed up and hard to use indices. And even worse – we may end up with very complex search queries that need way more resources than we expect. This post goes through simple analysis of example beer store search index and shows how to create Azure Search index for products.

I have local database where I insert some data and I want this data to be available also in cloud. As a lazy guy I don’t want to synchronize data manually. After setting up local and cloud databases I activated Azure Data Sync to just find out that it conflicts with EF7 insert and update queries. As I don’t have many tables and my database is pretty small I invented simple workaround.

Our beer cooling solution is not controllable through IoT Hub and it reports data there. We can control our device through simple command line application but it is not enough for us. In this post we start building Universal Windows Application that helps us monitor temperatures. In this post we focus on mobile application.