My last blog post was over six months ago. Covid 19 has hit the world, and I will be honest I have found it a challenging time. My Blog had gotten into a bit of a mess. It had become fragmented with different versions of the same thing; I will attempt to explain what has become of my blog. The original WordPress site...

Let’s Encrypt is amazing, you can easily add SSL certificates to any website and automate the renewal process. I have talked before about how impressive it is. Once you start adding SSL certificates to your production sites however you may want to check when they expire so you don’t get caught out. You can always open...

It has just been announced at the annual Star Trek Las Vegas (#STLV ) convention that Patrick Stewart is going to return to his role as Jean-Luc Picard in a new TV Show. Few other details have been announced other than the TV show will take place 20 years after the film Star Trek: Nemesis and will feature the...

Terraform is a way to script the creation of Azure Resources. By scripting the creation of your resources you can run them again and again and be certain that everything is configured exactly the same as the script has specified. No more forgetting to tick the tick box, if it’s in your script then it will be deployed...

Automated releases of software are great but how can we add an element of feedback so only good releases go live. I have been using Azure DevOps to release my PwnedPass android app to the Google Play Store for a while now. There are options to deploy to the alpha, Beta or Production tracks and even to set % of users to...

So you have created a super API that does something amazing. How do you document it so people will use it? One way of easily documenting your API is to install the Swashbuckle package. Install-Package Swashbuckle.AspNetCore Install-Package Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Swagger Then in you startup.cs add the following lines...

Azure Key Vault is a secure way of storing your keys, certificates and secrets so your application can access everything it needs to but you don’t have them being stored insecurely anywhere such as in source control. I have been wanting to give Azure Key Vault a try for a while now as it can make use of Azure Active...

While at Microsoft Ignite I heard about a lot of cool tech that I want to know more about. The best way to learn something is use it to solve a problem. So what can I build that is both useful and will let me play with some new tech? I have a Xamarin Forms app Pwned Pass that has over 500 downloads on Google play and...

I have just spent the first day at the conference Microsoft Ignite | The Tour. The conference was free I just needed to arrange travel and accommodation. Microsoft have really looked after me and all the other guests, breakfast and lunch has been provided, I got a free t-shirt, coffee (or tea) all day plus a beer or...

I have been using Azure DevOps (Or VSTS or VSO etc) for a while now and one of the great features is doing automatic builds with every check-in. This is more commonly known as a CI (continuous integration) build. More recently I have started playing about with creating my build using YAML files instead of using the web...