Getting started with Azure Functions

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.

Read more

ASP.NET MVC: Precompiling views

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.

Read more

Azure Search Suggesters: Helping users to find search keywords

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.

Read more

Writing simple REST-client for Azure Search

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.

Read more

Why Azure REST API-s and how to prepare for using them?

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.

Read more

Planning and creating Azure Search indexes

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.

Read more

Making Entity Framework 7 and Azure Data Sync work together

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.

Read more

Beer IoT: Building Universal Windows Application to monitor cooling process

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.

Read more

Beer IoT: Visualizing sensors data using Power BI

We are eager to try out our beer cooling solution and we want to see it in action. We want to visualize our data and keep eye on temperature of cooling beer. Before doing anything more complex like building web or mobile app we make a quick shortcut and bring our data to web, desktop and mobile. This post is about Power BI in action.

Read more

Beer IoT: Using Stream Analytics to save data from IoT Hub to SQL database

When cooling beer we want to store history of temperatures for two reasons. First, it gives us valuable history data for next cooling sessions. As a second thing we can ask measurements when we temporarily lost connection with IoT Hub. In this posting we make some analyzis and then build up database for our beer cooling solution.

Read more

Beer IoT: Reporting measurements to Azure IoT Hub

As we have now fully functioning thermal solution running on Windows 10 IoT Core it’s time to focus to other components of our beer freezing solution. Our solution measures and calculates metrics of cooling beer but it doesn’t report this data anywhere. In this blog post we will set up Azure IoT Hub for our solution so it starts reporting measurements to Microsoft Azure.

Read more

IFileClient – Generalizing storage access in ASP.NET web applications

This is one of the examples from my presentation about how to port existing ASP.NET applications to Windows Azure and how to build hybrid applications that work in multiple environments. One of important aspects is file storage that may have multiple implementations for different technical environments. In this posting I will introduce you my idea about generalized file access in web applications.

Read more

First look at Visual Studio Online “Monaco”

With Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft also announced online version of Visual Studio for Windows Azure Web Sites. When I first saw SharePoint Napa tools and “powered by Vsiual Studio” slogan then I knew that soon Visual Studio is on cloud. Now Microsoft made their next step. Let’s see what Visual Studio Online with codename “Monaco” is and what you can do with it.

Read more

Windows Azure error: An unsupported response was received. The response header ‘MSDeploy.Response’ was ” but ‘v1’ was expected.

You may get the following error when deploying your web application from Visual Studio to Windows Azure using WebDeploy: Remote agent could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer.
An unsupported response was received. The response header ‘MSDeploy.Response’ was ” but ‘v1’ was expected.
The request was aborted: The request was canceled.
COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

Read more

Deploying independent web applications to Windows Azure using single web role

I found very good blog post by Andy Cross’ Blog where he describes how to deploy multiple web sites in a single Windows Azure web role. I like the idea but there are some things that should be understood and done differently if you plan to use same web role for totally different web applications that you want to run on your Windows Azure instance. In this posting I will show you how to deploy independent web applications to Windows Azure instance using single web role.

Read more

Windows Azure Error: Failed to start Storage Emulator: the SQL Server instance ‘localhost\SQLExpress’ could not be found

When running some of your Windows Azure applications when storage emulator is not configured you may get the following error: “Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize Windows Azure storage emulator. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Storage Emulator: the SQL Server instance ‘localhost\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Storage Emulator using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK.”. Here’s how to solve this problem.

Read more