As it is stated in the Azure Portal Application settings are encrypted at rest and transmitted over an encrypted channel. You can choose to display them in plain text in your browser by using the controls below. Application Settings are exposed as environment variables for access by your application at runtime.

Storing sensitive data as application settings is preferred over having them in plain text in your code. In this article we are going to see how to define them in your Azure Portal, how to integrate them in your Function-code and how to give them values when you are debugging your Functions locally.

Here is a small and quick article about how to perform the update in your C# project that contains the Azure Functions of your application

If you use the Azure cloud for hosting your application, chances are that you are also using a Storage Account and you are accessing its content via the Azure Storage Explorer tool.

If you are all of the sudden get the Unable to retrieve child resources. This request is not authorized to perform this operation error, then a possible reason for that is that the IP you are using to connect to Azure is not yet white-listed

Azure Functions are compact and lightweight chunks of code hosted in Azure cloud and can be accessed via HTTP. Since these functions might access sensible data of your application, you want a safe way to call them.

When you are in the development phase, you can use the Host Keys which is a way of authenticating yourself when calling an Azure Function.

When in production, you will have to change to App Service Authentication, since the Host Keys should not be stored in the client’s machines.

When you run your application on an Azure App Service there will the case where you want some extra logging information when errors happen. A fast way to get the exact error and its stacktrace in your application is to activate the Application Logging. To activate it, you have to do the following simple steps:

In the previous article we focused on building the Continuous Integration Pipeline of our hello-world Vue app.

In Part 2 we are going to do the steps for deploying the result of the CI Pipeline to Azure. From there our static website is going to be visible to the rest of the world.

Here are the steps you will have to take:

While I have some extra free time because of the Corona virus outbreak, I decided to experiment with Vue and build a small static HTML Hello-World application for getting to know the framework better. The website contains no backend code.

The article focuses on how to automate the Build and Deploy process of our small application. I will try to clarify the steps needed till our static website is visible through an Azure URL.

In this article I will skip the Vue logic of my app and focus solely on the DevOps tasks that have to be made in Azure DevOps. Our static website will then be deployed on an Azure Storage Container. The article focuses on Windows users.

Back in 2017, I wrote an article about how to program an Azure Function in Visual Studio. With the current article I want to give the current state of creating Functions, this time in Visual Studio Code.

We are going to create a GET Function that retrieves all the rows from an Azure Storage Table and returns them the caller.

Here are the steps from scratch:

Some time ago I wrote an article with an example of an Azure Function which I used in my applications. With the current article I want to present you another real-life example of using different Azure Services and combining them together in a Logic App.

A Logic App represents a workflow of steps that are defined to be done in a sequential or in a parallel manner.

Our scenario contains a company which owns an eshop. We are going to build a workflow for getting customer orders, pushing them into a queue for almost-real-time process (A queue is a good way to balance load of large number of requests in your servers), retrieving them back, storing them in a storage table and informing the user about her order with an email. The most important thing, we are going to develop all the steps inside the Azure Portal; the use of Visual Studio is optional.

After we finish with the creation of our Logic App, we are going to have the following workflow:

When writing SQL queries to test them against your CosmosDB collections, chances are that your deal with the following error message:

Identifier XXX could not be resolved.

where XXX is the name of a property inside your collection. You could have for example the following query:

SELECT * FROM students WHERE firstname = 'Christos'

The reason for the error is that you forgot something in your query.

The last few days I have been experimenting with the different types of App Services that the Azure platform provides. One very interesting combination of app services is a ASP.NET MVC client (Azure Web app) or a WebAPI (Azure API app) which acts as the middleware between a JavaScript client and an internal “business” WebAPI (Azure API app). The architecture looks like this:

Today I invested some time into getting deeper to the topic of Azure Functions. Together with the new microservices architecture, new ways of doing business logic arise. Azure Functions are small chunks of code that run in a “serverless” (you do not care about allocating new hardware resources, even when the requests to the function raise) environment and each of them is meant to do one specific job.

Apart from the great examples and templates with Functions that you can find inside the Azure Portal, I tried to think of some use cases that I would use an Azure Function for a web application and I came up with the following one:

Non-relational databases are becoming more and more popular as a solution for storing your data. Cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure also get more popular with every day.

Currently Azure supports two types of “NoSQL” databases in the Azure portal. The one is DocumentDB (the NoSQL option in the main menu of the portal) and the other is the Table Storage (from the Storage accounts option in main menu). Do not confuse this Table with the tables of a relational database, they are not the same! A detailed analysis of the differences and similarities of the two technologies is beyond the purpose of this article, but we can summarize them to the following points:

With the Azure cloud solution from Microsoft we can create a new web application with Visual Studio, deploy it as a Azure Web App and “go live” in only few minutes.

I recently was faced with the “The subscription is not registered for the resource type ‘components’ in the location ‘Central US’” error when I was trying to publish my new web application to a Website (or a Web App) in Azure. Either starting from scratch with a web project and doing the mapping or by using the Publish option of an already created project, I was getting the same error. Visual Studio tried to publish the application to Windows Azure with no success.