Blogs Archives - Subhankar Sarkar

Jul182021 by Subhankar Sarkar2 Comments

The Plain and Simple Way to Create SPN and Service Connection for Azure DevOps Pipelines

The Plain and Simple Way to Create SPN and Service Connection for Azure DevOps Pipelines If you are getting started with Azure DevOps Pipeline for Application Deployment in Azure, you need two basic things for your Azure Pipeline to Authenticate and deploy to Azure. One — a Service Principal Name (SPN) in Azure and a Service Connection in Azure DevOps. In this article, I’m going to show you how to quickly create SPN in Azure Portal and a Service Connection in Azure DevOps. Background — Azure SPN and DevOps Service Connection TL; DR: You can skip this section if you just want HOW TO guide. Just jump to Creating an Application Registration and SPN in the Azure Portal section to get started. For simplicity, think of SPN as a service account in Azure Active…

Jul32021 by Subhankar Sarkar1 Comment

.NET 6 Azure Web App Deployment using Azure DevOps Pipelines

.NET 6 Azure Web App Deployment using Azure DevOps Pipelines This is the Summer of 2021, and Summer means a ton of new announcements and public previews of cool stuff from Microsoft to play with. This summer a few things are on my radar and, I’m really excited about the possibility. First and foremost, .NET 6 with C# 10 (I can see the future lies here). Visual Studio 2022 and finally Windows 11. I got my personal development machine updated last weekend. To put everything into a test, I wanted to write a piece of code in .NET 6 (a Minimal API) with C# 10 in Visual Studio 2022 IDE on Windows 11, test it on Linux (WSL2). And, finally, deploy the app in Azure App Service using Azure DevOps pipeline. Many in…

May162021 by Subhankar Sarkar2 Comments

Hosting Free Website with Serverless backend on Azure Static Web App

Hosting Free Website with Serverless backend on Azure Static Web App If you are looking for a cost-optimised website deployment (or may be a free web hosting) in Azure then this is for you. A couple of years ago I found a technique of hosting static Websites in Azure that costs only a Dollar (I call it One Dollar Deployment). This was using Azure Storage’s static website. In Build 2020, Microsoft announced Azure Static Web App with a Serverless Backend. This was different than my Azure Storage’s static website. It was fully managed and automated using GitHub actions. I was excited about the possibilities of it but wasn’t happy that it supported GitHub actions only for deployment. After almost a year, Azure Static Web App started supporting Azure DevOps in Public…

Apr152021 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Inner Source – the key to improving software asset reusability

Inner Source - the key to improving software asset reusability Some background first Can you afford to re-invent the wheel? I’m sure most of you will say a big NO. Similarly, in software development, it’s not very common to build a piece of software from scratch unless you are building something which was not done by anyone before you in the world. Typically, a development team gets help from a platform like GitHub, or get help from other similar projects running within your organization. They copy the base code (let’s call it the initial codebase) from others and start developing on top of that. This is re-using the wheel.This is one way of looking at re-usability, since they have re-used someone else’s code. When we talk about improving the re-usability of software…

Oct242020 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Visual Studio Codespaces – Bringing the Power of Cloud to Your Development Environment

Visual Studio Codespaces - Bringing the power of Cloud to your development environment Some background info first So, you are a developer, you develop your magical apps using Visual Studio and often time get frustrated with the sluggish development environment? which in turn kills your productivity? And guess what, to solve this, you plan to upgrade the hardware of your computer (is it practical?)? what if I tell you without upgrading your development environment's hardware, you can achieve super-productivity even using your aging computer? Sounds exciting? isn't it? Well, this is possible with Visual Studio Codespaces. Visual Studio Codespaces is a cloud-powered development environment. With Codespace you use your Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to connect to your code running in some remote cloud-hosted container. Nothing runs on your…

Sep262020 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Document Versioning with Azure Blob Storage

Document Versioning With Azure Blob Storage Some Background First Almost all organizations have a need for document storage for their applications. If the organization is a Microsoft shop then, one of the most popular choices for them is SharePoint Document Library. SharePoint Document library allows you to store documents, retain their versions, provides the ability to make any old version to the current version, last but not the least deleting a specific version of a document. With all the goodness of SharePoint, it comes with its own limitations. For many custom cloud applications build, SharePoint may not always be the right choice because of various reasons. It needs a dedicated setup, licensing etc. And just to use the document library feature, the investment may not always be justifiable. So, what…

Dec12019 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

One Dollar Deployment – the inexpensive way of deploying Single Page App in Azure

Cost effectively deploy Single Page Application (SPA) in Azure with just a Dollar How are you deploying your static Single Page Application (SPA) in Azure today ? Two of most popular options widely available today are - either you go with creating an Azure Virtual Machine (IaaS) and deploy there or create an Azure App Service (PaaS). But are they cost effective ? How about you get an option where your cloud bills for your SPA will be within couple of Dollars only? or maybe within just a Dollar ? Azure Storage Account's Static Website Hosting is here to save a lot of your cloud bills. Lets see how you can leverage this concept for your SPA deployments in Azure. What are you paying today? Just a rough estimate on…

Jul202019 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

.NET Core WebJob Console app CI/CD using Azure DevOps Pipelines

.NET Core WebJob Console App CI/CD using Azure DevOps Pipelines Background WebJobs is a feature of Azure App Service that enables you to run a program or script in the same context as a web app, API app, or mobile app as per Microsoft Document. If you build your WebJob Console app in .NET Framework then its very easy to build and deploy the WebJob with the parent API or Web App as by linking it to Web/Api App as below - The above linkage of WebJob console application with parent Web/API app is not supported by design in .NET Core. So what do we do ? In this Article we are going to see how we can build a .NET Core WebJob Console app separately from the parent Web/API…

Jun172019 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

WSL2 for Dockerized .NET Core application

Build Containerised .NET Core Application using Docker on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 When first Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) launched, I tried to use it as a Linux development platform and ran my first Cross Platform .NET Core Web Application and I found it amazing. With the popularity of Microservices, containerised applications with Docker is one of the hottest topic in the market. While learning this piece of tech I thought of using my WSL to use it as my Docker development platform natively on experimental basis.While doing many failed attempts to install and trying to configure Docker in WSL1, Microsoft announced the release of WSL2 on their 2019 Build conference.Also, it was announced that a full-blown Linux Kernel is shipping with Windows 10. Naturally my expectation for…

Sep302018 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Azure DevOps – manage your application lifecycle in cloud

Manage your Application's lifecycle in Cloud using Azure DevOps Infographic : Application Lifecycle Management in Azure DevOps What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ? Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, software maintenance, change management, continuous integration, project management, and release management. [Source wikipedia.] An ALM tool should have the capability to maintain all the aspects of a software lifecycle, such as capturing the ideas, users requirement, planning of work, maintaining source code, deploying code using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). It should also provide real time project insights to the key stake holders of a project. We can think of an ALM software as one stop shop for a software project/product management as a…

Jul212018 by Subhankar Sarkar1 Comment

Make your .NET Core HTTP endpoint to react to Custom Azure Event Grid Events

Custom Azure Event Grid event handling with .NET Core WebHook Some background first In todays Cloud first world Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and reactive programming are gaining a lot of traction in Microservices architecture design and development paradigm. In the event driven architecture scenario WebHook plays a huge role doing various stuffs in a reactive manner with Pub-Sub model. When a HTTP endpoint responds to a request (instruction) and does some stuffs like GET, POST, DELETE then we can safely call it API, but when a HTTP endpoint responds on it's own when certain event occurs then we can call it a WebHook. For a WebHook to respond to certain events it has to subscribe to an event publisher with it's HTTP endpoint URL. In the current context WebHook is the subscriber of…

Mar252018 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

SQL Information Protection – why should you care and what you can do about it?

SQL Information Protection - why should you care? A little background In today's world data privacy and protection is one of the biggest concern for the organizations across the globe. Most of the apps, websites we use today captures some sort of personal data like email address, phone number, date of birth and even our credit card information in some form or the other. Recent data breaches are making app and website users less confident on the companies who manages their data. This is hampering the brand image and trust for the companies. One of such recent Cambridge Analytica Facebook data scandal triggered movement like #DeleteFacebook. This caused billions of dollars for brand like Facebook and trust factors went negative for them.To help protect Citizen's personal and sensitive data - data…

Dec242017 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

SQL Server on Linux – Install and use it with SQL Operations Studio

SQL Server 2017 on Linux - install database engine and manage it using cross platform SQL Operations Studio. As we already know that Microsoft loves Linux and similarly SQL Server also fell in love with Linux. On October 2017 Microsoft announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017 for Linux. This relationship brought us many goodness in the table. This gives us freedom of Platform of our choice, unprecedented security of Linux, pricing of opensource with all great features, this are just few examples. Few of the studies also found that moving secondary databases to Linux paid for itself in less than nine months. Now you can imagine the possibilities of this movement.To bring the SQL Server on Linux experience - in continuation of my previous post, in this post…

Dec122017 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Windows Subsystem for Linux – build ASP.NET Core MVC web app in Linux

Build Cross Platform ASP.NET Core MVC Web application in Windows subsystem for Linux. Have you ever imagined of running .NET in Linux? it sounded like a crazy idea or a wildest dream of a Microsoft stack developer up until a couple of years ago. But not anymore... this is a reality now. With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Windows 10 we can do many crazy things, one of such thing is running .NET applications inside Linux (yes your wildest dream is not a dream anymore, it's a reality now).Today we are going to witness one of such things by building a ASP.NET Core MVC web application in Linux. We are going to install .NET Core in native Ubuntu installation. Will build a MVC web application and then run it…

Dec102017 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Run native Linux bash on Windows 10

Native Linux on Windows 10? Yes! it's real. Let's see how. Remember those old days when we had to use Linux’s VI editor to write C, C++ , Java code in our School/ College days? Do you also remember how we used to get that black UNIX terminal (Bash) in our Windows machine? Well…mostly we had to do telnet from our Windows system to the Linux server to get the terminal back so that we can use the VI editor and write some code.I can remember in our programming lab we had a Linux server and it was connected to multiple Windows terminal. We used to telnet to the Linux Server to run the Bash and form there all other subsequent commands. If anyone wanted to configure a standalone system on their…

Dec42017 by Subhankar SarkarNo Comments

Microsoft Loves Linux – what it means to you and your clients?

Microsoft's new open philosophy - see how you can help your clients. 'Microsoft loves Linux' - yes you read it right. There was a time when Linux was compared with Cancer once. The scenario has totally changed. Now they are kind of in a romantic relationship. If you have followed some recent announcements by Microsoft in Satya Naddela era, they are really focused on making things open source, making things cross platform, building things for Cloud and Mobile first world. Few years ago, we got .NET Core - a modular, high performing light weight .NET framework to build cross platform applications targeting Windows, Linux and MacOS. Which enabled us modernising the application in the era of client side heavy, modular, containerised applications built for cloud and obviously targeting operating system of…