Azure Key Vault is a pretty handy way of centrally managing access to secrets and logging what process has requested access to them. The best way to use it is for Azure hosted resources such as Web Applications or VMs for which you can assign a managed identity to the Read more…
Although there’s plenty of documentation by Microsoft on how to use their Bing Ads API the documentation on how to initially connect to it seems a bit fragmented so this is an attempt to summarize all the steps required to grant a console application access to the API. Most of Read more…
You can host images (or other files) in Azure Storage by making the container with them in public but if you want them to be private and only accessible to authorized users then you can either generate a short-lived SAS key granting read permissions on the blob or you can Read more…
The Azure computer vision API can be used to retrieve information about an image including tags, descriptions and categories along with their associated confidence scores. The Microsoft quickstart guide to using this is here and my releated code is below. This retrieves an image file from Azure Storage and streams Read more…
Previously I’ve used Azure AD to authenticate web application users as well as to retrieve authentication tokens for accessing Azure resources but I hadn’t tried retrieving tokens during the initial login before. It turns out that this was much trickier than I’d expected, partially because of how abstracted away the Read more…
As part of a recent project I needed to embed a Power BI Dashboard in a webpage, in order to authenticate access to this dashboard Azure AD authentication was used, this directs the user to the standard Microsoft login and they are then redirected back to the desired page afterwards. Read more…
If you want to host an FTP site in Azure there’s currently not a dedicated resource for this so the next best option is to spin up a virtual machine and use IIS for running the FTP site. It’s also possible to set the FTP site to use an Azure Read more…
In Azure Web Apps I’ve set up previously I’ve managed to get SSL certificates for the custom domains used by using the “Let’s Encrypt” site extension in the kudu management portal as detailed here. I’d hoped it would be as easy to do this with Azure Functions as with the Read more…
It’s possible to export an Azure SQL database to a BACPAC file using the Azure portal and PowerShell among other methods but the documentation makes no mention of doing this directly in .NET, though happily this is also possible. The process detailed below triggers a database export to a specified Read more…
When publishing a .NET Core 2.0 Web App to Azure from Visual Studio 2017 the initial few deployments seem to work as expected but after a while they often start failing with the message ERROR_FILE_IN_USE. There’s a few proposed solutions for this, the initial one I tried was to increase Read more…