System Design

Azure Service Principal Credential Reset

Featured Image courtesy Miguel Á. Padriñán. I recently ran into a small issue with this blog. The credentials that Github workflows use to deploy the application had expired. As someone who doesn’t login to Azure on a daily basis and whose primary role is not application development on the cloud, I did not see this coming. So my Github action to deploy this blog failed with the following message: AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app '***' are expired....

April 23, 2022 · 4 min · 682 words
Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory for Developers: What you need to know

This is a long read and I spent a pretty long time going through videos and articles compiling this into one post. Not something I would have done usually. But I do think that sometimes having it all in one place is easier to access than splitting into multiple articles. I hope the TOC helps group things. Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. Lots of words. But do they make sense?...

October 23, 2021 · 12 min · 2370 words
Azure Search

Azure Cognitive Search (formerly Azure Search)

Background I have in the past, in my previous job, used ElasticSearch extensively for our internal search. When I joined my current firm, I proposed using Elastic Search for our policy search problem, which apparently was slow and inefficient. This wasn’t surprising at all to me, as they were using simple SQL to search for relevant data. This was bound to be slow. So having proposed Elastic Search, I did a little POC and showed how easy it was for me to set up Elastic search on my machine on one node and showed how searching was a breeze using RESTAPIs and other clients....

August 27, 2021 · 7 min · 1351 words
EF Core

Entity Framework Core: Configure Database Connection using Azure Service Token Provider

Update - READ THIS FIRST There is now support to connect to any Azure SQL database, Azure SQL Managed Instance and Synapse SQL in Azure Synapse Analytics from your .NET Core app using just the connection string. To learn more about this read the following pages: Use Azure Active Directory Authentication with your Azure DB Using Azure Active Directory auth with SqlClient This will completely eliminate the need to write any code to obtain a service connection in your application....

June 26, 2021 · 11 min · 2319 words
Open Json

OPENJSON - The Utility function you did not know you needed in a Data transfer Logic App

Background I have been using Logic Apps to transfer data from one database to another. Of course, there is business logic in the queries run on the source database. And in such a case, maybe Azure Data Factory might have been a better choice. It very well could be. But for now I have been using a logic app, that simply runs a pretty big query, fetches the results and inserts into my destination database after some checks on the data present in the destination database....

June 21, 2021 · 6 min · 1146 words