Azure

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. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka.ms/NewClientSecret, or consider using certificate credentials for added security: https://aka.ms/certCreds. Trace ID: bd3c9b5a-5677-4dbf-9136-78883da00700 Correlation ID: cdd461df-0722-4770-9b9a-d97e29181d94 Timestamp: 2022-04-18 18:07:59Z I understood that a credential had expired, which logically meant that I had to reset the credentials for the account/service principal that was being used by the continuous deployment setup for this blog. ...

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? ...

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. This POC was sufficient enough for us to consider a wider project and develop a solution which later got ported to Azure Search as we migrated to the cloud. To this day, we haven’t regretted our decision. ...

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. I found this out when I shared this post earlier on Twitter. ...

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. It works. However, using your Logic App to do some data related operations, especially to a SQL database, requires some wisdom. ...

What are Azure Logic Apps? Azure Logic Apps are an Azure service that lets you visually build integrated solutions to connect several different apps and services together, and comes with a click and select interface. It enables you automate business processes without writing any code at all! What is business process? A business process or workflow is a sequence of tasks that produce some sort of outcome, which may be some data, decision, notification. ...

If you work on .NET applications on Azure, you probably might be thinking of how and where you would log information about your application, like telemetry information. I shared this link to the youtube video that gives a good set of instructions to set this up yourself. There are some things that the video doesn’t cover. ...