Articles tagged dotnetcore
How to Secure User Data in Azure Cosmos DB
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. 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...
Secure Your .NET 6 Web API
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. .NET 6 is here and many of us are making preparations to update .NET 5 codebases to .NET 6. As part of this review,...
Managing Multiple .NET Microservices with API Federation
For large enterprise companies, boundaries around each team are crucial for maintaining systems that are owned by software engineers. This is accomplished by allowing individual teams to own their systems and expose them via APIs. You also need to keep certain types of cross-cutting concerns centralized, like select security controls, logging, and routing. If you don’t, every API across different teams has to implement common controls like rate-limiting, logging, and authentication. This can lead to...
Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET
Why you should care about dependency injection Dependency injection is a tried and proven design pattern for producing code that is testable, readable, and reusable. This is achieved by creating (or increasing) a separation of concerns, where each class has a dedicated area of responsibility. Dependency injection is just one design pattern used to achieve inversion of control in which the calling code, or client, has no knowledge of the inner workings of the dependency,...
Using Azure Cognitive Services in a .NET App
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. 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...
Secure Your .NET 5 Blazor Server App with MFA
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Introduction to Server Blazor apps Blazor is an exciting new technology from Microsoft that will allow developers to bring C# to clients. Server and...
How to Write Cleaner, Safer Code with SonarQube, Docker and .NET Core
When it comes to code quality and code security, SonarQube is your teammate! This analysis tool is pretty straightforward to use, especially with some help from Docker. In this post, I’ll show you how to run a Docker container with SonarQube to analyze the code of a simple ASP.NET Core 3.0 application. Code analysis is a critical component of app development because it can identify security issues and other tricky bugs that might be overlooked...
Web Forms Migration to Blazor in .NET Core
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. ASP.NET Web Forms framework has been the cornerstone technology of .Net for web development since the release of .Net Framework in 2002. ASP.NET Web...
How to Toggle Functionality in C# with Feature Flags
Toggling functionality using feature flags in .NET Core apps is quite straightforward, especially with a neat little feature flag management service. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to build a simple web application using Okta for user authentication and how to use ConfigCat to manage and access feature flags. What Are Feature Flags? Feature flags (aka. feature toggles) are a relatively new software development technique that enables development teams to turn features on...
A Quick Guide to Elasticsearch for .NET
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Implementing search functionality in your .NET Core apps doesn’t have to be hard! Using Elasticsearch makes it easy to develop fast, searchable apps. In...
Update App Secrets with Jenkins CI and .NET Core
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Introduction Jenkins is a free and open-source application that makes it easy to create CI/CD pipelines in almost any language or environment. Jenkins features...
Developer's Cheat Sheet for C# 9.0
Introduction to C# 9 (and a bit of C# 8, too) Let’s start with a background on how C# 9 got here (implementation examples start in the next section). The last few years in computer science, we’ve observed the rising popularity of the #FreeLunchOver concept. The idea is that CPU technology, based on electrical signals and Von Neumann architecture, has reached its intrinsic limits. As long as integrated circuits were slower than light, we knew...
How to Use WebAuthn in C#
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Nowadays, using a password for authentication is becoming less and less secure. Password attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and data breaches occur more frequently....
How to Support .NET Core SameSite + OAuth Apps on Linux
Google’s recent approach to SameSite cookie attributes caused a bit of confusion among developers. Especially in cases where handling redirects is necessary. After doing some research in the topic I’d like this article to be a guide on how to handle SameSite cookie attributes properly in production. This guide can serve as the basis for deploying an application to any Linux based environment—such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google Cloud App Engine—or any VPS Linux deployment....
How to Deploy Your .NET Core App to Google Cloud, AWS or Azure
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. There has been a cut-throat competition between cloud hosts in the past few years - each attempting to earn the sympathy of developers and...
Rider for C# - The Best Visual Studio Alternative IDE
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. When it comes to developing .NET apps, Visual Studio has historically been the default choice for .NET developers for two main reasons: Visual Studio...
Install .NET Core Apps on Linux in 5 Minutes
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. As a big fan of open source, I’m loving the fact that .NET Core is cross-platform. It opens up endless possibilities, from hobby projects,...
How to Authenticate with SAML in ASP.NET Core and C#
Security Assertion Markup Language, more commonly known as SAML, is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties. Most commonly these parties are an Identity Provider and a Service Provider. The primary use case for SAML has typically been to provide single sign-on (SSO) for users to applications within an enterprise/workforce environment. Up until the past few years, SAML was considered the industry standard—and proven workhorse—for passing an authenticated user into applications...
Deploy a .NET Container with Azure DevOps
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. 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...
How to Build Securely with Blazor WebAssembly (WASM)
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Last month I came out with a video tutorial on Blazor WebAssembly and I thought it would be good to follow up with a...
How to Adapt Your .NET App for SameSite
Have you run across an error message vaguely referencing SameSite in your .NET Apps? Read on, it’s time for a change to your code - and I’ll explain why. I like cookies, both the custard stuffed and the dry ones (which I use to dunk in my coffee or tea). This post is very much about cookies - only not the delicious, culinary ones. As in many other cases (think of the web, for example),...
How to Secure PII with Entity Framework Core
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. When the products we develop collect sensitive data, it’s essential to secure and safeguard it to protect user privacy and the user’s identity. Personally...
Super Simple GraphQL Tutorial with C#
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. In today’s connected world, APIs are becoming an essential part of software and hardware companies. APIs allow companies to expose their services to third-party...
The Most Exciting Promise of .NET 5
It’s time to get jazzed about the future of the .NET ecosystem! It’s hard to believe that .NET only came out in 2002. There are so many versions of the framework, rapidly changing the places a C# developer could create and support. The entire ecosystem just turned 18, and it has been confusing at times with versioning. I fell in love with how powerful the platform was, but often, choosing to upgrade to the latest...
ASP.NET Core 3.0 MVC Secure Authentication
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. On September 23rd, Microsoft announced the third major release of its .NET Core framework. This new release boasts better performance, support for Windows Desktop...
Build a Simple .NET Core App on Docker
Wouldn’t it be great if stuff just worked? Especially in the ever-changing world of software. Chasing dependency issues and debugging arcane operating system errors - not a good use of time. One important aspect of “stuff just works” – reliability. Recently, the software community has made strides in test-driven development and continuous integration processes to drive up quality, and of course, that improves reliability. But it can only go so far. Operating systems perform many...
5 Minute Serverless Functions in Azure without an IDE
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. 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...
5 Reasons Why You Should Give Visual Studio for Mac Another Try
Visual Studio has not always been as user-friendly on the Mac as it is on a Windows machine. Lately, however, the stable release of VS for Mac is really starting to feel like a simple, but luxurious cousin to Visual Studio 2019. Different, but related. Installation on a Mac is quick, simple, and allows you to get into coding right away - whether you are already familiar or an Apple-only dev getting into something new...
The Top 5 DevOps Automation Tools .NET Developers Should Know
Not too long ago, deployments were done by hand - manually pushed to a physical server somewhere in a building your company owned. The software engineering world has come a long way since then, and we have more options than ever get our code and data live, automatically. Here are a few tools every C#/.NET developer should know that can help with that process, vetted by some of the best software leaders in the business....
Alexa, Sign In Every Time: Voice-Only Authentication Verification in .NET
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Authentication for voice, specifically Amazon’s Alexa, has its limitations. The initial Account Linking process Amazon provides for identification works for many scenarios, but it...
AWS Lambda vs Azure Functions for C# Serverless
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...
Visual Studio 2019 Tips and Tricks
Microsoft recently released the preview of Visual Studio 2019 for Windows, and it’s got lots of improvements and features! After reading the release notes, I reached out to Allison Buchholtz-Au and Kendra Havens on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft to get an idea of what features should be configured immediately after downloading and installing this shiny new IDE. After they showed me a couple of quick tips, VS 2019 started to feel like the...
Go for liftoff at Okta!
T-minus 3… 2… 1… I’m blasting my way into the Developer Relations world like Alice discovering Wonderland and its fantastic cast of characters. I am so curious, and excited, and all of the feels that come with coming to Okta! Officially stepping into the Developer Avocado (er… pardon me, Advocate) role and bringing the love of .NET, voice and IOT to the party. Who is this Lady Nerd? Well, for starters I am obsessed with...
Add Login to Your ASP.NET Core MVC App
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. One of the improvements in the latest version of ASP.NET Core (MVC ) is a new and simplified authentication integration. However, managing authentication on...
Build a SPA with ASP.NET Core 2.1, Stripe, and Angular 6
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Buying things on the Internet has become a daily activity and is a feature many new projects require. In this tutorial, I will show...
Upgrade your ASP.NET Core 2.1 App to Angular 6
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. With the release of ASP.NET Core, there are several templates in the DotNet CLI. One of those templates is an Angular template that scaffolds...
Build a Secure CRUD App with ASP.NET Core and React
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. These days it’s prevalent to have a “back-end” and a “front-end” allowing two (or more) teams to work on a project. Microsoft’s latest version...
Deploy Your ASP.NET Core Application to Azure
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. 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...