Azure, DevOps and .NET articles

Consider the following real-life application scenario. Your Web App (Azure App Service) accesses a CosmosDB instance to read data. Your users access the web application from its UI, and you want to ensure they cannot directly access the CosmosDB instance using its public URL.

In this article, you will learn:

• How to use a System Managed Identity and RBAC roles to access your CosmosDB instance from your Web App
• How to integrate your Web App and your CosmosDB with an Azure Virtual Network
• How to create a Service Endpoint to allow only the Virtual Network to access CosmosDB
• All the necessary az CLI commands to complete the tutorial, without using the Azure Portal UI :)

In this article, I will show you a full tutorial on how to create a .NET application using Angular for the frontend and deploy this application with Azure DevOps pipelines on multiple App Service environments.

You are going to learn:

• How to use pipeline templates to simplify the structure of our pipeline
• How to use multiple stages to split semantically different jobs
• How to use multiple Azure environments by elevating the power of a for loop in the pipeline
• How to use Bicep for setting up the needed Azure infrastructure
• How to deploy the application on an Azure App Service by using different deployment slots

You can find the code for this tutorial on my GitHub account.

From time to time, I like to refresh my knowledge of some basic features of C#. Today, we are going to focus on the .. operator, also known as the range operator, and the ^ operator, also known as the hat operator.

Consider the following scenario in Azure:

• We want to create a new Azure Function triggered by an HTTP request containing some data.
• We want to write this data as new entities into a Storage Table.
• We want to avoid storing any connection string in your code and instead use an Entra ID Managed Identity.
• We want to avoid writing any specific code by using the SDK for accessing the Table.

The TableOutputAttribute comes to the rescue. Let us see how.

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides secure storage for secrets, keys, and certificates of your applications. Integrating Key Vault with Azure DevOps pipelines enhances security by managing sensitive information efficiently.

This article will guide you through the process of accessing secrets from an Azure Key Vault using a Service Principal with a certificate within an Azure pipeline. We will start for the very first steps of creating all the needed resources in Azure, before going back to Azure DevOps. For training reasons, we will perform all the configuration steps with CLI commands, avoiding the Azure Portal UI.