Hello, I'm   Jason

Steve Smith, also known as Ardalis, has recently released a free eBook titled Architecting Modern Web Applications with ASP.NET Core and Microsoft Azure. You can obtain this free eBook here. The book reviews an online store application sample that demonstrates some of the principles and patterns described in the book. The book follows a monolithic architecture approach, but there is an accompanying book, that I blogged about here, that discusses microservice-based architecture using the same online store sample.

The acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft was completed less than 24 hours ago. Nat Friedman posted about the acquisition becoming final and emphasized that not only will GitHub remain a separate company, it will continue to invest in many of the projects it believes in. Congratulations to both GitHub and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what the future holds and how the DevOps process will continue to evolve. I’m already excited to see some of the “paper cuts” that the GitHub team has already solved.

Azure DevOps is currently undergoing a facelift. If you are using the new design and you leverage the Package Management (Artifacts) option in Azure DevOps:

It’s possible that you need your application to handle the datetime values being sent to your app service. One reason for this is that date and time values being passed in may not include the proper time zone designation. By default, Azure Web Apps use UTC settings. To change this value, visit your Azure App Service. In the App Service menu, scroll to Application settings. Add a new setting under Application Settings called WEBSITE_TIME_ZONE.

At TechBash earlier this month, Jeremy Likness shared an in-depth overview of NoSQL. He talked about Azure CosmosDB and different types of NoSQL data structures. Jeremy blogged about it placing the full deck of his presentation on his site at https://blog.jeremylikness.com/say-yes-to-nosql-for-net-sql-developers-74391f785133.

Imagine that you’ve published a web app to an app service in Azure. You’ve tested the app and then head out to dinner with family and friends. You decide to showcase your website over dinner and see an error. Now what?

A lot of groups start out by using Azure DevOps or another source control system using individual user accounts. However, as your organization continues to grow, you will likely need to connect to a directory such as Azure Active Directory to authenticate users. For Azure DevOps, this is really quite simple. To do this, log into the Azure portal as an Application Administrator or Global Administrator. Once you are logged in, click on All Services in the menu to the left and scroll until you find ‘Azure DevOps Services organizations (formerly Team Services)’. Click on the appropriate DevOps organization. If you don’t see the organization you are expecting, be sure you are at least a Project Administrator in the DevOps instance. Then, you’ll see the settings come up similar to the following:

Ten years ago when I was an avid blogger, I relied quite heavily on Feedburner to consume my RSS feed and distribute to subscribers. That worked, but social media wasn’t really a thing yet and readers relied quite heavily on feed readers for news. Today, most “subscribers” follow content using social media, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, or content aggregators, such as Reddit or Medium. So, when building my new blog, I thought about how I can best communicate posts that I make to others. Traditionally, I could use something like IFTTT or Zapier. Microsoft also has a competing product called Microsoft Flow. However, I may want to add some additional logic before communicating to the world. For this, I can use the product that power Microsoft Flow called an Azure Logic App.

Azure has had Storage for a very long time. Typically you would use AZCopy to copy Azure blob storage to your local machine. What you may not know is that Azure Storage Explorer allows you to view your storage as well including uploading, downloading, and copying URLs for your files and folders. Download it today by visiting https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/storage-explorer/.