Streamlining Helpdesk Operations: Leveraging GitHub Issues with Custom Workflows and Templates
Setting the Scene: Choosing GitHub Issues for Internal Helpdesk Needs.
Posts by Year
2024
2023
Apply caching when restoring NuGet packages using a GitHub hosted runner
When you are using a GitHub hosted runner to build your project, you can apply caching to speed up the build process. This is especially useful when you are ...
Sending Emails On Behalf of Someone Else in SaaS Solutions Using SendGrid and .NET
Introduction In the modern SaaS landscape, flexibility is key. One commonly sought-after feature in Helpdesk and similar software is the ability to send emai...
Making API calls more resilient
In the world of networked applications, call failures are a common occurrence due to the inherent unreliability of networks. When working with the Azure Cost...
Retrieving the active Azure Subscription ID from the AZ CLI Context
Managing Azure subscriptions can be a delicate task, especially when dealing with various tools and applications that require context-specific information. I...
How to get a token to access the Azure cost API
The Azure Cost CLI is a command-line dotnet tool created to facilitate interaction with Azure’s cloud costs. While the development of the tool was a technica...
From Full Stack to Full Circle: Embracing the Cyclical Nature of Software Development
In a recent conversation with a senior colleague, I jokingly referred to myself not as a full stack developer, but as a “full circle developer”. While it sta...
Direct download from Azure Blob storage using Content-Disposition header to set the filename
For an application I m building, I store attachments on Azure in blob storage. This service is a relatively cheap and scalable solution for files that need t...
Visualizing Azure Costs with MermaidJS and GitHub Actions: An In-Depth Guide
When working with Github Actions, it’s important to be able to output data in a graphical way easily. One way to do this is to use MermaidJS, a JavaScript-ba...
Maximizing Your Azure Cost Savings: Strategies, Tools, and License Benefits
Are you looking for ways to optimize your Azure costs and manage your cloud spending more effectively? Azure offers a range of tools and strategies to help y...
Optimizing Remote Work with GitHub: The Power of Asynchronous Communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to adopt remote work practices, but most of them are still at Level 2 in the Distributed Work’s Five Levels o...
Ensuring API Compatibility with OpenAPI Comparator and GitHub Workflows
Maintaining backward compatibility is crucial when developing APIs. As APIs evolve, changes may be necessary to introduce new functionality or improve perfor...
2022
Debug Azure Functions with timer triggers locally
I recently saw a blog post on how to debug Azure Functions which run on something like a timer trigger. As you must wait for the timer to kick off, it is har...
Different ways to return a collection from a REST API
Returning a collection of data in a REST API can take various forms, but there are some standards and specifications that help you to take the most out of it...
Monitoring options for API Management
Monitoring your API Management operations is important. It gives you insight in the usage, the load and performance. But also helps you troubleshoot issues a...
How to allow teams to use API Management while staying secure and compliant
Are you working with Azure Api Management in your organization? Do you let your feature teams deploy APIs from their pipelines? If so, how do you make sure t...
What is the QUERY HTTP verb all about
Did you ever hear about the QUERY HTTP verb in your REST API? You might know the GET and POST, but when to use the newly proposed QUERY method? First; why ar...
Use job summaries in GitHub Actions to generate a list of releases
GitHub has a new nice feature to create job summaries for your actions. It allows you to generate markdown from your workflow that is rendered in the GitHub ...
Trace and log an amazon correlation id retrieved from another party in API Management
A correlation Id is a great way to track requests over multiple boundaries and aids in troubleshooting. When you get an identifier from another party, it can...
Use Bicep to add rate limit representation to an API Management operation
In a previous blog post I showed how to roll out a definition for an API management operation using Bicep. Recently I added functionality for rate limiting s...
Remove conflict (409) failures from Application Insights when using CreateIfNotExistsAsync calls
Application Insights is not only an excellent tool to see what your application is doing, but it also shows you how your dependencies are behaving. There is ...
Use different rate-limiting options in Azure API Management for business and non-business hours
Using API Management in front of your application has many benefits; one is using rate limiting. Rate limiting is a way to limit the number of requests that ...
Generate documentation using Doctave and host it on GitHub Pages
Documentation as code is something I blogged about before. In that specific case, it was about converting Mermaid diagrams to images so you could browse the ...
2021
Build a GitHub Actions Marketplace using the Github CLI, Jekyll and Tailwind CSS
When you work with GitHub, you most likely use GitHub Actions as well. A great way to execute all kinds of tasks, like interacting with Git, performing a bui...
Use Mermaid diagrams with images inside your documentation using GitHub
Writing documentation is a burden in a lot of software projects. Besides the fact that it is often done afterward and gets outdated soon, it is not directly ...
Using GitHub Environments approvals without the ability to self approve
While developing code, you apply the best practices, like working from a short-lived feature branch and performing a pull request to the main branch when you...
Annotate a release in Application Insights using GitHub Actions with Bash
In 2017, I already blogged about sending a release annotation to Application Insights. This graphical indication gives an excellent overview of when new rele...
Use managed identity to store data in storage account queue from API Management
In a previous post, I described how to create a SharedKey which could be used to drop data directly into a storage account queue from API management. Althoug...
Simple OAuth2 API authentication with token caching and refetching in an Azure Function using IdentityModel and Refit
Connecting to an HTTP API is tricky enough, let alone handling the authentication to it. Many modern APIs allow you to provide an authentication key in the h...
Use DefaultAzureCredential to securely connect to Azure services from Visual Studio
When you want to connect to an Azure service, you want to use a secure way for the authentication. One of the best techniques is to use a managed identity. Y...
Provision an Azure Function plan with a subnet using Bicep
In a recent project, I need an Azure Function hosted inside a subnet. To have vnet support, I need to use a premium plan, and I wanted to use Linux hosting a...
Link Application Insights to Azure API Management using Bicep
As it is good practice to monitor your system, I also wanted this to include the API Management side. It is allowing me to see the failed request in more det...
Roll out a definition for an API management operation using Bicep
I needed to roll out individual operations via infrastructure as code principles for API management in Azure using Bicep in a recent project.
POST data from API Management directly to a storage account queue
When you want to accept data, queue it up and process it at a later stage, you might want to use a simple way to push data to the queue without building a ba...
2019
Being on call
True DevOps means you build it, you run it. You are responsible for the whole stack, including production. And when it comes to production, you have of cours...
Use Application Insights over multiple systems to track dependencies
It is essential to have an overview of what your software is doing, not only to troubleshoot issues but also to see how data flows through your system and ho...
How to monitor a 24 hour global event
For the last three years, Xpirit and Solidify organize the Global DevOps Bootcamp, an online event that teaches people about the DevOps practices using Micro...
Generate Kubernetes Access Token
There are various ways to connect to a Kubernetes cluster, but for a recent event (GDBC) I needed to connect to an Azure Kubernetes Cluster using an API call...
Mess up your wall with Scribit
I recently received my Scribit, a wall drawing robot, that I backed using Kickstarter. You can read more about the device at the Kickstarter website or direc...
Add http compression to your httpclient in dotnet core 2.1
Microsoft added a nice feature in dotnet core 2.1 that allows you to register HttpClient instances in a central place and inject them using Dependency Inject...
Analyze your project with SonarQube using a docker container
SonarQube is an excellent static code analyzer tool as it has many different analyzers and provides useful suggestions for any potential bugs and issues. As ...
Retrieve the callback url of a logic app inside your ARM template
In a recent project, we use Infrastructure as Code to roll out resources to Azure. For this, we use ARM templates, and part of this template is the deploymen...
2018
Use Carter to create a simple HTTP API in ASPNET Core
Creating an HTTP API can be done in multiple ways, but if you are a .NET developer, you most likely will use the ASP.NET Web API framework. In previous versi...
Sending Delivery information to VictorOps from Azure DevOps releases using Bash
When you are using an Incident Management alerting tool like Pagerduty or VictorOps, it might be beneficial to notice when your deployment system is performi...
Canonical URLs in an HTTP API
When you are building an HTTP API, you need to make sure your endpoints have a canonical URI structure. You can describe a canonical URL as your preferred en...
Kubernetes and Visual Studio Code, an ideal combination
In a recent project, we use Kubernetes to host our workloads. The cluster and agents are running in Azure and we used to have this set up as virtual machines...
Global DevOps Bootcamp - Provisioning the workitems
On the 16th of June, Xpirit organized the Global DevOps Bootcamp. An event that took place all over the world as multiple venues (75) in all kind of countrie...
Run RabbitMQ using Docker Compose with guest user outside localhost
In a recent project, we needed to run RabbitMQ as a replacement for our Azure service bus. The Azure SB works fine, but when we wanted to create a local end ...
Override docker-compose port numbers
When you are using a docker-compose yaml file, you basically describe how your containers need to run and interact with each other. Part of this are the port...
Retrieve an OAuth client token from Azure AD using Runscope
Runscope is a great online tool to validate and test API endpoints. For a recent project, we are using it to mimic traffic from an external system that is su...
2017
Create indexes with included columns with Entity Framework Core using code first
Entity Framework allows you to use a code first approach in creating your database design. Basically, you create your classes, maybe add some annotations and...
Application Insights release annotations from Linux
Application Insights provides an enormous amount of information about your application, infrastructure, users etc. It can be difficult to see if a recent cha...
Integrate and change a VSTS pull request
You might have seen it with GitHub; when you do a pull request there will most likely be a build being kicked off and that influences the state of the pull r...
Use health endpoints in ASPNET Core with Docker
It is important to know if your nicely created application is still working correctly, but you do not want to keep refreshing your browser and seeing if that...
The importance of planning poker
When you practice the scrum process, then one of the artifacts is planning poker. It is a method to gather estimates for the stories and with teams new to sc...
Run the Azure CLI 2.0 on a VSTS hosted Linux agent
The new Azure CLI version 2 is pretty easy to use when you want to manage your Azure resources. Even if you want to use it from the VSTS build/release agent,...
Save money in Azure by shutting down VMs
In Azure, you pay for what you use. And when we talk about virtual machines, this means that you pay for the compute, network and storage. This is charged by...
Password complexity
The complexity of picking a good password and what you can do as a developer
Kubernetes on Azure
There are a lot of resources on how to setup Kubernetes on Azure, but they require some prerequisites, so I wanted to make a step by step guide here.