Cosmos DB is a cloud database product from Microsoft that offers scalable and high-performance services. The core product runs on a proprietary NoSQL database that should look familiar to experienced MongoDB developers. Microsoft offers several APIs in addition to the core Cosmos DB API. These include APIs for: SQL MongoDB Gremlin Cassandra The shift to serverless database operations is one of the most obvious advantages of migrating. Cosmos DB can automatically scale your throughput based...

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Microsoft’s Azure platform has as many high-tech products as anyone could ever want, including the Azure Static Web Apps service. As the name suggests, the platform hosts static web apps that don’t require a back end. Azure supports React, Angular, Vue, Gatsby, and many more, out of the box. However, you may run into situations where you want some back-end support, such as when you need the backend to run one or two API calls....

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Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of cloud-based AI products from Microsoft Azure to add cognitive intelligence into your applications quickly. With Azure Cognitive Services, you can add AI capabilities using pre-trained models, so you don’t need machine learning or data science experience. Azure Cognitive Services has vision, speech, language, and decision-making services. In this article, you will learn how to use the Vision Face API to perform facial analysis in a .NET MVC application...

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There has been a cut-throat competition between cloud hosts in the past few years - each attempting to earn the sympathy of developers and dev-ops by rolling out shiny new tools, plugins, and integrations. There are a gazillion how-to tutorials and guides in the community on using these tools. Sometimes when looking for a solution, it is hard to find the newest and simplest way. I never know if an article written last year is...

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When I began programming (in the ’80s), computers weren’t equipped with a network card by default. The internet was almost unknown and modems were slow and noisy. The software was installed from stacks of flexible floppy disks. Today, computing resources are virtual. The internet is vital and there is an URL for everything. We live in the *aaS (* as a Service) era, where if you want something, there is likely one or more something...

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Back in the days of DOS, software developers couldn’t count much on fancy tools. There were no graphical interfaces, and everything was purely text-based. I remember using brief as an editor for my C source files (C++ didn’t exist yet), and compiling the code from the command line with the Aztec C compiler. The most advanced concept of a non-trivial software project was based on makefiles. The idea of grabbing a mouse and moving it...

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Spring Boot is an awesome solution to speed up the development cycle of your app. Have an idea and want to transform it into a Spring Boot app, but don’t know the best way to deploy it? Look no further, we will help you out! There are plenty of options to deploy Spring Boot applications. In this article. we will cover three of them: Azure Amazon Web Services Self-hosted We will use a simple application...

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Microsoft Azure makes it incredibly easy to get a basic API/microservice up and running quickly! If you are unfamiliar with building serverless architecture in the Microsoft ecosystem, using Azure Functions has become a quick way to get back-end code up and running that is easy to understand and usable for anyone. In this tutorial, we will set-up an API endpoint using the HTTP Trigger invocation that you can use with any front-end site. I use...

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Cosmos DB is a planet-scale database capable of holding billions of records (“documents” using Cosmos jargon) without significant detriment to performance. In this article, you will learn how to use Azure Cosmos DB - a key-value store solution - your ASP.NET app instead of a relational database. To demonstrate their differences, check out a simple example query using both a relational database and Cosmos DB. When you query a relational database you get back a...

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Nothing ruins your weekend quite as wholly as getting paged at 2 am on Saturday to tell you that there’s been a data breach at your company. In this post, I’m going to talk about how you can reduce the risk of that happening by keeping secrets out of your source code. By following this guide, you’ll create an ASP.NET Core MVC web application that uses Okta for identity management. Rather than working through a...

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As a C# developer, I became interested in how using a serverless function could complement existing projects I had done in ASP.NET 4.x. Enhancing ecosystems by using it for new requirements - without starting over from scratch - really had appeal. AWS Lambda came along first, with Azure Functions emerging onto the scene a couple of years later. In this post, we will briefly examine my experience getting started on both after using the .NET...

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Inevitably it happens. You go to one of those bars that has three trillion beers on tap, and you stare hopelessly at the wall of taps trying to decide what to order. Panic no more! Hop Roulette is here to save you from embarrassment when the bartender asks, “What’ll it be?” Hop Roulette is a simple Azure Function that returns a random beer from an API. What use is this? It gives me a fun...

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One of the scariest features of Visual Studio is without a doubt right-click to publish. There are very few instances in which you’d actually want to make use of this “feature” and so many more in which it’s a terrible idea. In this post I’ll walk you through the right way to secure and deploy your new ASP.NET Core app to Azure. My method might not be as fast as right clicking to publish, but...

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