If you’re using Entity Framework with a legacy database then you may well have single character status flags in some of the columns such as “O” = Operational, “M” = Marketing. Ideally these would be numeric IDs that match to a separate status table which would allow the IDs to Read more…
If you’re using VARCHAR(MAX) columns in SQL then you may occasionally want to view the stored values in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) as part of the debugging process. Because a VARCHAR(MAX) field can store up to 2GB of data SSMS truncates the data returned to 8200 characters in the Read more…
I’ve been working on a web portal that users Azure Active Directory (AAD) for user authentication and for requesting permissions to the Azure Graph API, the code for which is based on this sample project. This uses a library called Microsoft.Identity.Web that assists with acquiring and storing tokens, currently this Read more…
Entity Framework is a nice way of accessing databases without having to write any data access code. Because Entity Framework is able to modify data in your database it needs a primary key to be defined in order for it to be able to uniquely identify rows. In my case Read more…
It’s easy enough to send messages to an Event Hub using the EventHubs NuGet package as specified here, but if you want to test it by making you’re own HTTP POST requests to the endpoint then it becomes a bit trickier. There’s some Microsoft documentation here about manually sending HTTP Read more…
If you want to get a random string in SQL then you could use newid to generate a GUID and take the alphanumeric characters from it, however while these should obviously be unique from each other they don’t contain the full range of characters that may be desired and sequential Read more…
I use IdentityServer to manage access to a few client APIs with the configuration details stored in SQL. The one downside to using IdentityServer is that there doesn’t yet seem to be a good option for administration of credentials, though Skoruba.IdentityServer4.Admin certainly looks promising. In order to add new clients Read more…
There’s a pretty comprehensive set of APIs available for interacting with Azure resources but unfortunately these seem to be so new that there’s not really much documentation around on how to use them. For an example of the information that can be returned by these APIs you can use the Read more…
In a similar vein to my post on storing complex properties of a TableEntity in Azure Table Storage it’s also possible to store Enum text values by using custom attributes to control serialization/deserialization.
I’m in the process of building an Azure Function to replicate some of the functionality found in Postcodes.io. This function will accept one or more postcodes as input and return details of the postcodes in the response. This looks retrieves the postcode details from a copy of the ONS Postcode Read more…