Automated Deployment of Azure Functions - ARM Templates
May 27, 2018
Whilst working with Azure Functions I found it difficult to find good documentation on best practices with Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery. This two part article aims to summarise my learnings in the hope it helps someone in a similar position.
My requirements were straight forward:
Utilise an ‘Infrastructure as Code’ approach: all azure resources required are created via versionable definition files rather than using manually clicking through the Azure Portal.
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Enum.IsDefined()
Feb 06, 2018
Did you know that you can assign any integral type value to an enum even if it is not part of the enum values?
Consider the following int based enum.
public enum FunRunDistances { FiveKilometers = 5, TenKilometers = 10, HalfMarathon = 21, Marathon = 42 } Although 5, 10, 21 and 42 have been explicitly added as values of the FunRunDistances enum, the following code does not produce an error:
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Hosting free blog using Netlify & Hugo
Jan 05, 2018
This is the second article detailing my exploits to build a free blog. The first attempt, failures and learning can be found in Part 1.
In case you din’t read the first article, I am trying to create a blog to solve the following problems:
Host a blog cheaply as possible - ideally for free. Simplicity is king - particularly when it comes to authoring and publishing.
Realised after first attempt: Solution needs to work cross platform - as I use both Windows and OSX.
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Hosting free blog using Wyam
Dec 29, 2017
I am trying to create a blog to solve the following problems:
Host a blog cheaply as possible - ideally for free. Simplicity is king - particularly when it comes to authoring and publishing.
This article explains my first approach, my failures and learning before moving to Netlify which is covered in Part 2 - Netlify.
The approach Wyam Static content generator Being a .NET developer I tried out https://wyam.
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But it worked in SSMS?
Jun 03, 2017
Every year, towards the end of May, hundreds of thousands of people across the world start their virtual journey around the Global Challenge. This creates my team’s peak load on our website and has happened every year for well over a decade. Each year we spend significant resources to ensure we have a performant system when under peak load. In May 2017 we were somewhat surprised when we encountered some performance bottlenecks that we had previously not seen before.
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Minimising Azure Bills with App Service and Traffic Manager
Mar 06, 2016
Our team works on high scale website available at globalchallenge.virginpulse.com. Historically we have used Cloud Services and over the last year we have migrated to Azure App Service specifically Web Apps. We choose to migrate to Web Apps for a variety of reasons such making deployments and operational overheads more efficient.
A quick note on Azure terminology:
A Web App is a type of app intended for hosting websites and web applications.
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A different take on database standards documentation
Feb 11, 2016
In my opinion the two biggest drawbacks of technical documentation for developers are:
It is rare to find technical documentation that not up to date. Teams rarely treat documentation as a living document, and without a concerted effort by the team to keep it up to date goes out of date. The documentation is not in front of developers when they need it most. For instance a new starter might read the database standards documentation in their first week, and not when they create something in the database.
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Lava Layers Anti-pattern
Oct 17, 2015
Whenever introducing a new technology to an older codebase it’s important to have a plan on how and when to replace the existing technology. Case in point, consider an existing codebase with over one hundred ASP .Net WebForms that are used every day. My team was forced to get creative when trying to introduce the shiny-ness that is ASP .Net MVC. This great piece by Matt Hawley was the creativity we needed.
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