Key Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2024

I couldn't make it to Ignite this year, but you know what? Watching it online has its perks. No distractions from the bustling conference floor, just pure, undivided attention to all the juicy details. Here's the TLDR version: Start with AI, AI, AI, sprinkle in some Copilots soaring through the

Microsoft Azure

How to uncover the names and parameters of blades in Azure Portal

Azure Portal has its functionality organized in blades and extensions. Blades are the visual parts you play with, while extensions serve as the logical module that contains blades and are typically paired with Azure Resource Providers so that an extension provides the necessary UI bits and pieces for an Azure

Microsoft Azure

How to use Azure Portal blades in the Template Specs UI

Template specs are a great way to share templates across the organization so that users and developers can deploy approved workloads within the organization. Access to them can be controlled with Azure RBAC. By default, the Azure Portal will create some default look and feel by inferring the parameters of

Microsoft Azure

Lively Azure Dashboards with Azure Resource Graph

Learn how to utilize Azure Resource Graph to bring life into your Azure Dashboards. The blog post will help you set up a dashboard that visualizes the recent changes in all subscriptions and also shows orphan resources.

Microsoft Azure

Passwordless deployments from GitHub Actions to Microsoft Azure

You've likely had to deploy something to Microsoft Azure. Whether that is a deployment of an application or a deployment of infrastructure, you always have to provide some unique information that you possess to authenticate. In this blog post, I will show you how you can make your life easier

ASP.NET

Publish ASP.NET Core 7.0 web apps to an Azure Virtual Machine

I've recently had to find a way to deploy an ASP.NET Core web app based on .NET 7 to a set of Azure Virtual Machines. It turned out that although the option is easily available in Visual Studio publishing settings, there are quite a lot of steps in the

Microsoft Azure

Invoke any Azure REST API from Azure Data Factory or Synapse pipelines

In this blog post, you will find out how to call any Azure REST API in order to complement your data integration needs.

General

A guide to online account security

I've been witnessing how people I know are falling victim to identity theft. Their online accounts get stolen because they make a lot of mistakes when it comes to securing them. I can see every week new accounts of friends popping out in the digital world and asking me for

Microsoft Azure

Announcing my book Introducing Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)

It's been a tough year! My blog hasn't received much of my attention. I am sorry, my dear readers. But I am delighted to announce a new book named Introducing Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) published by Apress with a foreword written by Yaron Schneider, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft and

Microservices

Simplify microservices with Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime)

Building distributed applications is a tough job! To get it right you will need lots of tools just to get started. Think about availability, scalability, service discovery, data consistency, developer productivity... Now you have chosen some kind of a container-orchestration system like Kubernetes (K8s) to address some of the challenges.

.NET

Camera as a Service or how to control your camera with .NET

I have been looking for a way to automate my Nikon DSLR for quite some time. And this is happy me. who managed to automate my camera to capture a photo once my Raspberry Pi 3 gets disconnected. I had to prepare a good demo with Azure IoT Hub for

Microsoft Azure

The fall of Envestio - Some technical evidence [UPDATED]

Maybe you have already heard about the issues with the P2P lending platform Envestio. After some noticeable instability, their website went down on 21 January and it's still unavailable as of the time of publishing this blog post. That makes it more than 24 hours without an official statement of

Microsoft Azure

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment of SSDT Projects: Part 2, Creating Azure DevOps pipelines

CI/CD for databases is tricky! Let me show you how you can do it by using an SSDT project template and Azure DevOps.

Microsoft Azure

Cloud Frugality: How to reduce >99% of your small-scale semi-static website costs?

Most people believe that cloud is always more expensive than all other options. That is probably true if you don't see how to combine the right offers to achieve more. Cloud is about getting more bang for your bucks, meaning you get a lot of added value. One life lesson

Azure App Service

Kudu: The Magic Behind Azure App Service Continuous Deployment

I used to take both gravity and Continuous Deployment to Azure App Service for granted. This has wasted a lot of time executing manual tasks upon deployment. Sometimes you just need to execute several commands in addition to the default behavior. You probably don't really need to create a whole

Azure App Service

Introducing Ghost 2.x on Azure App Service

Back in October 2017, we decided to make the support for Ghost in Azure better. And it turns out many folks have been using our Ghost-Azure repository to host their blogs in Microsoft Azure. Ghost 2.0 has been released and we already have adapted it to be easily deployed

Microsoft Azure

Overcoming the maximum limit for deployments per Resource Group [2020 Updated]

You may have reached a certain point where you cannot make a new deployment against a particular resource group. The error goes like this: Creating the deployment 'Your-Deployment-Name-Goes-Here' would exceed the quota of '800'. The current deployment count is '800', please delete some deployments before creating a new one. Please

SQL Server

Continuous Deployment of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) Projects, Part 1: Make it repeatable and self-sufficient

I will show you how to set up a continuous deployment process for your SQL Database Projects.

General

Merry Christmas!

I look forward to Christmas every year. It is a time to reach out to those we have missed this year. May this cover of White Christmas that we performed with Desislava Zlateva find you in good health and spirits!

JSTalks

Building intelligent creatures with Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Node.js

JSTalks was a wonderful experience this year. I met so many interesting people who were willing to invest their Saturday in order to master some JavaScript skills. I actually learned a lot from them. And later then, I probably forgot a good part of it during the after party... :) I'm

Azure App Service

Ghost 1.x on Azure App Service

Ghost wants to be the next great thing in blogging. I can show you how to deploy it on Microsoft Azure.

Blogging

I can't start a thing without saying...

...Hello World! Welcome! This is my new space on the web! What am I going to talk about here? Lately, I find myself coming up with interesting solutions to uncommon problems. And I think it is worth sharing them with the world. I hope I write mainly about technologies, to