If you are thinking about using Azure Functions, at some point you will be confronted with the challenge of figuring out how application logging works. Logging in Azure Functions has some unique challenges due to the stateless nature of the serverless execution model. In this article, we will cover some basics about Azure Functions and provide instruction on how to …
We are living in a golden age of programming. The language and tooling have never been better. Not a day goes by that I’m not impressed by some new programming language feature (how cool are nullable reference types in C#?); or a new technology (Live Share and Teletype are going to change the lives of remote developers); or some adaptation …
Working with containers provides a lot of benefits. They are a lot faster to spin up and shut down than virtual machines. They run everywhere, which gives you the benefit of having the exact same environment locally as in production. And because they run everywhere, you can run them in any cloud or on-premises, which prevents you from being locked …
One of the great features of ASP.NET is all the metrics available via Windows performance counters. There is a wide array of them available between IIS, ASP.NET and .NET. This guide on ASP.NET performance counters will review some of the top counters you need to know about and why they are valuable. We will also talk about how to monitor …
As the Microsoft framework becomes more powerful (and more popular), the more important it will be to stay abreast of the latest news and updates. Luckily there is an entire ecosystem of teachers, writers, thinkers, and speakers that are dedicated to pushing .NET forward. You’ve surely come across a few of the big time .NET blogs already. Scott Hanselman is …
Performance counters are really important for monitoring and troubleshooting problems with your .NET applications. The full .NET Framework provides a wide array of performance counters that are very useful for troubleshooting application problems. Some examples of important performance counters are garbage collection and exception rates. Without these, you will be flying blind. In this article we will discuss how to …
Almost every application these days communicates over HTTP: websites, RESTful services, and even SOAP APIs all make use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For the most part, we don’t worry too much about what is happening at the network level when we’re building these applications. However, from time to time a problem will show up that needs us to drop to …
.NET Core 2.0 was made publicly available on August 14. Besides .NET Core, .NET Standard 2.0 was released, the standard to which .NET Core 2.0 complies, as well as Entity Framework Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0. Pretty cool, all have the same version number, but I’m sure this won’t go on forever! I almost forgot about NuGet, which also …
Microsoft Azure is a beast of a cloud platform. It’s arguably the only true competitor to AWS, even though Amazon had a 4-year head start on building their cloud. What Microsoft has created is truly impressive, and all signs point to the Azure vs. AWS debate being far from over. If you’ve decided on Azure as your cloud platform, you …
Microsoft Azure is a great platform to use and it has many services and features. But how do you go about deploying your applications to the cloud and using them? There are several different options for deploying your applications in the Azure cloud and which one(s) you use and where you run them depends on the amount of control and …
Azure Event Grid is an awesome new service in Azure, which connects applications together through event messaging. This way of working decouples application components, which enables more scalability, maintainability, and extensibility. The image below illustrates this. Orders are written in and Azure Cosmos DB database. Event Grid reacts to each new order and publishes that as an event and the …
It seems like everyone these days is writing cool ASP.NET web applications. However, we all know that a lot of the real work is still done behind the scenes in background services. Buying something on Amazon no doubt kicks off a waterfall of tasks that are done behind the scenes to fulfill a single order. Including verifying stock, shipping, contacting …
I’ve always dreamt of being able to do facial recognition in one of my apps, but it always seemed too difficult to do. Facial recognition is complicated, it is something that much smarter people than me come up with. Now, with Azure Cognitive Services, I can easily add facial recognition to my app by just calling an API. Plus, I …
Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is a cloud computing model which provides outsourced computing infrastructure to users and organizations. It can provide users with resources that include servers, network connections, storage, and features like content delivery networks and load balancing. IaaS providers maintain the equipment, while users rent or buy the specific services that they need. The term for …
There are hundreds of questions you could ask to determine a job candidate’s fit for an ASP.NET related position. Characteristics of a good candidate include high comfort level, skill level, and an in-depth understanding of essential and advanced development concepts. The interview questions below make a good primer for screening employees working in the .NET framework. That said, this list …
Internet Information Services (IIS) uses a pool of worker processes (w3wp) to run ASP.NET web applications on Windows servers, but dealing with them crashing is no fun. The good news is, we are here to help provide you with resources on how to isolate and solve these issues, including how to identify crashes, capture crash dumps, and interpret them. Stackify …
Microsoft Azure is huge! There are so many services that it is sometimes hard to determine which ones you should use when. This is also true when it comes to storing your data in Azure. There are many different services in Azure that you can use to store your data in, but which one is right for you? Obviously, the …
Azure Cloud Services and App Service made it relatively easy to run web applications in the cloud. Developers still need a simple way to run tasks on a schedule at pre-defined  times or specific intervals . We commonly use simple console apps via the Windows Task Scheduler to handle these needs. WebJobs were released as part of Azure App Service …
The Microsoft Azure cloud offers a lot of services for almost every scenario that you might need. You can categorize these services into cloud computing types like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to determine the amount of control and responsibility you have versus the time you can spend on building things that matter. Let me explain these types a bit further: …
Asynchronous programming is a form of parallel programming that allows a unit of work to run separately from the primary application thread. When the work is complete, it notifies the main thread (as well as whether the work was completed or failed). There are numerous benefits to using it, such as improved application performance and enhanced responsiveness. But, like all …
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