Azure

I love how the Azure SDKs have evolved over the years. In the past, there was no consistency between the various Azure SDKs. However, that's not longer the case (at least for most Azure libraries), as they now adhere to the same principles and follow a set of well-defined guidelines.

What if we could script the creation and configuration of a GitHub Repository so that it is ready to provision or deploy Azure resources from a GitHub Actions pipeline? We will do that in this article using the Azure CLI and GitHub CLI.

If you are deploying your application to Azure from Azure Pipelines, you might want to leverage the ability to do so without using secrets thanks to Workload identity federation. In this article, I will demonstrate how to automate the configuration of your Azure DevOps project, with everything pre-configured to securely deploy applications to Azure.

Creating an application and deploying it to Azure is not complicated. You write some code on your machine, do some clicks in the Azure portal, or run some Azure CLI commands from your terminal and that's it: your application is up and running in Azure.

Today is a great time to be a developer:

In this article, we will talk about how to provision an Azure SQL Database with authentication restricted to Active Directory users/groups/applications. We will use Pulumi to do that.

By default when you use Pulumi, the state is managed by Pulumi Service which is very convenient as you can concentrate on building your project infrastructure instead of spending time on where to store the state and how to handle concurrency. However, sometimes for governance or pricing concerns, or any other reasons, you don't want to use Pulumi Service and you prefer to manage the state yourself with your own backend. In this article, we will see how we can do that using Azure.

This week is mainly about learning Azure tooling.

Have you ever felt a bit overwhelmed by the configuration in a project, not knowing where to look for the settings between the command line parameters, the environment variables, the configuration files in code, the configuration in Azure, ... ? When developing an ASP.NET Core application there are many places where you can put your configuration which makes it difficult to know where you should put it. Even if the official documentation about configuration in ASP.NET Core is very complete and well written, it only describes what you can use and how to use it, not what you should use and when. In this article, I will try to answer these questions and give you my opinion about how we should use configuration providers in ASP.NET Core.

If you are using Azure Functions chances are you are using the setting AzureWebJobsStorage in your Function App configuration. And it is quite likely that the value of this setting which is a secret is stored in a non-secured way directly in your Function App configuration, available to anyone who has access to this configuration. But do not worry, we will see in this article how we can make your Function App more secure by removing this secret.

In Microsoft.Data.SqlClient v3.0.0, a new authentication mode Active Directory Default has been released. Let's see what this means when querying an Azure SQL Database from some C# code.

This week I learned some Azure CLI commands, how to have JSON IntelliSense in vscode and that Azure Storage Explorer was usable again.

This week I learned a few things related to vscode and especially about the Azure IoT Hub vscode extension.

The possibility to add configuration sources in Azure Functions has just been released with the latest version of Microsoft.Azure.Functions.Extensions NuGet package. I have been waiting for this feature for a long time (like many people I think) because it brings to Azure Functions all the things we are used to with configuration in ASP.NET Core 😻. But that is not the only reason, it is also because with this feature you almost don't need to use key vault references!

Let's jum into Azure CLI to manage Azure resources. The article will show the syntax, the main functionalities and some less-known features like Azure CLI interactive mode.