Creating a User Assigned Managed Identity in an ARM Template
October 02, 2020I’m working on a new project that will use managed identities to access an SQL database from a function app. I chose to use a user-assigned…
Using Azure.Identity to Connect to Azure SQL
September 17, 2020The new library hit GA this month. I’ve been wanting to modify a lot of our services to use managed identities and this library, through…
My job is hurting my career! How do I fix it?
September 06, 2019I recently read a post on a career advice board from a software engineer who was worried his job was hurting his career. He worked with…
Paging in Azure Cosmos DB SQL .NET SDK
October 26, 2018Record paging is a really common requirement for APIs that expose a lot of data. Paging in Azure Cosmos DB SQL API is done using…
Powershell DSC Extension: Opening Firewall Ports with DSC
April 06, 2018I am NOT a systems administrator. But as I’m studying for the 70-532 exam one of the objectives is using the Powershell DSC extension. Most…
Build ARM Templates to Simplify Deployments
March 07, 2018One of the first Azure-specific projects I worked on was a script to create all of the resources needed to run our application. It used the…
Extending SQL Generation in Entity Framework Core
February 09, 2018I’ve been working on a project where we’re migrating a data access layer from an old ORM to Entity Framework Core. The old ORM has some…
Testing Entity Framework Core Migrations
October 11, 2017It’s a good practice to always test your EF migration code when you create a new migration, especially if you are manually tweaking the or…
Enhance your debugging experience by customizing debugger output
September 20, 2017Chances are if you’ve debugged something in Visual Studio you’ve set a watch on an object and seen something like this in the Watch window…
C# Optional Parameters Gotcha
September 06, 2017Optional parameters are a really useful feature in C#, but do you know how they actually work? They’re just syntactic sugar. If you call a…
Use your PowerShell prompt to differentiate between regular and admin sessions
August 30, 2017I often find myself switching between regular and administrator PowerShell sessions. If you have one of each session open, the only way to…
Using Message Handlers in ASP.NET Web API
December 24, 2016Message handlers are a very powerful yet underutilized part of the ASP.NET Web API framework. In this post I’ll demonstrate their usefulness…
Customizing Retry Logic in the .NET Azure Storage SDK
July 18, 2016In my post on the Retry pattern I mentioned the .NET Azure Storage SDK has retry logic built-in to it. The default retry logic is usually…
Cloud Design Patterns: Retry
June 07, 2016The Problem Cloud applications depend on a lot of interconnected services and resources. These services are generally reliable, but…
Cloud Design Patterns: Cache-Aside
March 24, 2016The Problem Imagine you’ve built and deployed an incredible new application that is taking the Internet by storm. At first you were amazed…