My Approach to Logging
Logging is an essential part of software development that provides a record of events and activities within an application. It allows both developers and sup...
Posts by Year
2024
Replacing BizTalk Business Rules Engine
Having developed on BizTalk Server for many years, I’ve used the Business Rules Engine (BRE) in numerous solutions via both orchestration shapes and the BREP...
Automating Scanning For Secrets
Source control is the foundation of software development for many reasons including tracking changes, collaboration, and backup/recovery. One of the most pop...
Configuring Isolated Azure Function Logging
Logging is a crucial aspect of any application for understanding and debugging the behaviour of an app in different circumstances as well as analysing how us...
Using the Factory Pattern with Dependency Injection
The Factory Pattern is a coding design pattern for creating objects by replacing the need to directly construct an object with a creator method. The purpose ...
Allow Temp Access to Azure SQL from Microsoft-Hosted Agents
Currently, I use Microsoft-hosted pipeline agents to handle my deployments due to their simplicity and minimal maintenance overhead. I’ve recently needed to ...
Handling Exceptions in Isolated Durable Functions
Exception handling is common place to attempt some functionality and, should exceptions occur, carry out some remedial function. Typically this might be to d...
Customising HttpClient Logging
In Integration development, having sufficient logs is key to being able to debug issues. .NET has the well-established ILogger pattern which is available by ...
Azure Function Polling Resiliency
Polling is a common integration pattern for extracting data from one system to integrate it into another. Azure Functions makes implementing the scheduling i...
Restore Isolated Durable Function Tuple Support
With the release of Azure Functions on .NET 8 and feature parity of the in-process to the isolated model, I’ve started to migrate existing in-process functio...
Recreating WCF Service in DotNet Core from WSDL
When Microsoft started porting .NET Framework to .NET Core (now simply .NET), some features were to remain on .NET Framework. One such feature was the server...
2023
Refreshing DevOps Service Connections
A while back I put together an application provisioning process using PowerShell and Azure Pipelines to automate delivering Azure application environments in...
Documenting Nullables in Azure Function OpenAPI
This post is about an issue a colleague and I encountered recently whilst developing a series of layered APIs. The issue was that nullable properties weren’t...
Integrating with Flat Files
With integration, there is often a need to integrate with ageing, legacy systems. This could be as part of a phased migration to a new system or that the leg...
Adding OpenAPI Service References
As an integration developer, one of the most common requirements I deal with is consuming APIs to integrate with different systems. There is still a wide var...
Mermaid JS Support for Minimal Mistakes
In the last 6 months I’ve started to use Mermaid JS to draft integration designs as well as document implemented integration applications. There is a lot of ...
Publishing Secrets to Key Vault
Most applications make use of configuration to allow an application or script to be used in different ways. A common scenario is when an application has a de...
Sharing Bicep Templates
This is the third in a short series of posts focused on Azure Bicep. In the first, we introduced Bicep by highlighting some of its benefits as well as how to...
Testing Azure Resource Templates
In the previous post we introduced Bicep, its benefits and how to deploy a template to Azure (specifically a resource group). In this post, we’re going to bu...
Introduction to Azure Bicep
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been primarily developing and deploying applications to Azure. Typically these deployments comprise 2 broad aspects:
Sharing Azure Pipelines Templates
I have been developing build and release pipelines since Team Foundation Server 2015 to deploy ASP.NET and BizTalk Server applications. Over the past couple ...
Securing your home lab using VPN and Tailscale
Over the last several years my home lab has grown from a single Raspberry Pi 4 to several in a Docker Swarm cluster. As the number of apps being hosted on th...
Handling Multi-Part Maps in Azure Durable Functions
BizTalk Multi-Part Maps I have been working with BizTalk Server since the 2010 version and have recently started to migrate orchestrations from BizTalk Serv...
Build Multi-Platform Docker Images
Over the last couple of years I’ve been using Docker more for running my home-lab to learn about containerisation by both deploying community images as well ...
Generate Swagger from Azure Function in Azure Pipelines
I’ve recently started to work more with Azure API Management to create a one-stop shop for my APIs. In the last couple of years, Microsoft has added the Micr...