Linux

My fellow MVP Jiří Činčura wrote a nice blog post about hosting ASP.NET Core applications on Azure B-series small virtual machines: Running ASP.NET Core app on Azure B1ls VM (penny pinching). It’s the cheapest option on Azure for small applications. In this blog post I give you some additional advice about smallest B1-series virtual machines so you can build up a little safety net for your applications to make sure they don’t run out from resources.

On the search for running development environments on cloud I stumbled upon service calles Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s nice service that moves development and debugging workloads to cloud and it makes it possible to use lightweight machines like tablets and hybrids for development. Here’s my overview of how to build ASP.NET Core web applications on codespaces and Visual Studio Code.

Yesterday Microsoft announced .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) – the effort to turn Xamarin Forms apps use single cross-platform code-base targeting multiple platforms. Demos from Build conference yesterday gave clear signal – it’s not just an experiment but real deal. They really had single project running on Windows desktop and iPhone. This blog post is short overview of what’s coming.

During lockdown I tried out how Azure Front Door works. It is another member of Azure load balancers and traffic routers world but it is global and designed for web applications. My only interest was to see how it works and if it is just for commercial sites or does it also fit for private WordPress blogs like I have. It was interesting journey full of of surprises and here’s the overview of what I did and how things worked out.

Until .NET Core gets its own cross-platform system metrics support I needed something simple to get system memory metrics of servers where ASP.NET Core application is running. I wasn’t able to find a nice solution but I still worked out something to get system memory metrics with .NET Core on Windows and Linux.

.NET Core 3.0 comes with support for self-contained executables. It means we can publish applications as a single executable for specified platform. Also trimming – removing of unused code from assemblies – is supported. This blog post demonstrates how to build self-contained executables using .NET Core.

Another day, another disaster with shared hosting. And not this usual gateway-is-down-problem when people are visiting my blog. I started my journey with simple idea – why not WordPress on Azure? After some experiments I got my first results and the picture wasn’t as terrible pricewise as I thought. Here’s my first experiment with WordPress on Azure.

Windows Subsystem for Linux is great feature for running Linux programs and trying out multiplatform ASP.NET Core applications under Linux. It is possible to browse and edit files on disks mounted to WSL but it didn’t worked with files on WSL “disks”. With next version of Windows it will change.

Code coverage reports for ASP.NET Core projects are not provided out-of-box but using right tools we can build decent code coverage reports. I needed code coverage reports in some of my projects and here is how I made things work using different free libraries and packages.

Windows 10 has something called Windows Subsystem for Linux and this something enables us to run Linux applications on Windows 10 using Linux without need for Hyper-V or other virtual machines. When building multi-platform applications like my open-source TemperatureStation solution then having Linux right there for testing comes very handy. This blog post shows how to get Linux running on Windows, how to install .NET Core and how to run web applications on Linux.