For years, WordPress was my go-to platform for blogging, but it was time for a change—one that aligns better with my values, both environmentally and financially. In this post, I share the reasons behind my decision to move to an Astro app deployed on Azure Static Web Apps.

In the past few years, I have presented multiple sessions all around the world, although mostly virtual. Presenting for a live crowd was something I only did inside The Netherlands before. With restrictions being lifted during 2022, new opportunities presented themselves and I was able to be in front of a live audience again, even outside the country!

In a previous article I described how to configure an Azure SQL database failover group for high availability across multiple regions. But what if you want to limit network traffic to a database in this failover group to only your private networks? In this article I show how to make a SQL database failover group reachable via the Private Link service and make sure the database stays reachable after a failover.

With an Azure SQL Database, Microsoft is already providing high availability with an SLA of at least 99.99%. But if you want to prevent to be affected by a large regional event or want to meet regulatory demands to be able to execute failovers to another region, enabling a failover group is the solution for you. In this article I will show you how to create a SQL database failover group in two regions using the Azure CLI.

Azure App Services make it quite easy for you to add one or more authentication providers to your application. But how do you add Azure AD as a provider using Infrastructure as Code? In this article I will show you the steps of deploying and securing an Azure App Service with AAD authentication using an Azure pipeline.

A lot of people prefer to manage their infrastructure as code. Some infrastructures might require an App Registration in an Azure AD. So, why would we not apply the IaC practice here as well? An Azure pipeline might stop you, stating “Insufficient privileges to complete the operation”. So, this is not possible, or is it? In this article I will show you how to make an Azure pipeline in charge of apps in your Azure AD.

When using a Docker Registry, like hub.docker.com, you will not often want to delete a published version of an image. You cannot know if someone, somewhere in the world is using that specific version. But when using a repository as part of your CI/CD pipeline, you might have lots of versions that are not used by anyone anymore. So, what if you want to clean the repository automatically? In this article, I will show how the delete images by tag, using PowerShell and the Docker Registry HTTP API V2.

The Custom Vision service is one of the Azure Cognitive Services that is provided by Microsoft. With custom vision, you can train a model with your own image data. The portal provides a Prediction API for the trained model to classify an image you supply. There can be reasons why you might not want to use the online REST endpoint and you could prefer an offline model. To work with machine learning in .NET, we can use ML.NET. There are several tutorials how to use this framework. But none of them combine the use of the Bitmap class with a downloaded ONNX model from the custom vision portal. In this article I will walk through the steps to set up an application to classify bitmaps using a custom vision model with ML.NET.

Using Docker images for your Azure web app is not brand-new functionality. But if you want to deploy your container-based web app using ARM templates and use your own Azure container registry, you might discover it's not as straightforward as you might think. In this article we will walk through the steps how we can make a connection to the container registry. In the end we will also make sure we do not have to pass along the password during the deployment.

These times should not prevent us from sharing knowledge and keep learning about great new technologies. For this, Info Support organized the lockdown lectures. I was honored to take part in this series and have people learn about the Open Application Model (OAM) and the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr). Here I share with you the recording and slides.

When working with ARM Templates, chances are you have set a value that was a Storage Account Connection String. For example as the value of an appsetting, or as a secret in Azure Key Vault, which I did as an example in a previous blog post. However, this does not result in the most maintainable and readable piece of JSON. Even worse if you have multiple connection strings in the same template. In this article I will show that adding a User-Defined Function to our template can improve on this.

This weekend I was speaking at WordCamp Nijmegen about the possibilities of hosting a WordPress site using Microsoft Azure. I’m sharing my Dutch slides here, and soon I hope to add the recording for WordPress TV in this post as well.

Today I presented a session, in Dutch, titled 'Gebruik Azure Key Vault in je applicaties en zorg dat niemand achter je geheimen komt' during the TechDays 2017 event. The presentation is about using Azure Key Vault to improve security of your solutions. I’m sharing my slides and code, so you can start improving the security of your solutions and deployments using Azure Key Vault, the Azure Key Vault Configuration Provider and Azure Key Vault Storage Account Keys.

The other day I wanted to configure Application Logging on Blob Storage for a Web App Service and found out this needs a SAS URL. And this is something an ARM template can’t provide for you. In this post, I will walk you through the necessary PowerShell code to run.

When I recently was configuring an Azure AD application, I couldn’t assign the delegated permissions for an Azure SQL Database. It did cost me a full day to find out the Azure Portal user interface has an unexpected user interaction when it comes to selecting APIs. In this post, I’ll explain how you can find all APIs available for your application.

Azure Key Vault is a great resource to store your secrets like passwords, connection strings, certificates, etc. and access them programmatically. A great feature is to add or update your secrets during deployment so you do not have to manage your secrets manually. In this article, I will explain how you can add secrets to an Azure Key Vault using ARM templates.

When I start on a project that uses Azure resources, one of the first things I do is build the infrastructure and automate the deployment using VSTS or TFS. In this post I‘ll explain how you can extend Azure Web Apps with Virtual Applications and Virtual Directories using ARM templates.

Last month I gave my session, in Dutch, titled Serious Request, Azure als schaalbaar platform during the dotNed Saturday event. I’m sharing my slides so you can start building awesome, secure, scalable, performing and monitorable web platforms using Azure.

I’m invited to speak at dotNed Saturday, the Dutch .NET community event. My session, is called “Serious Request, Azure als schaalbaar platform” and I’ll be talking about my experiences using Azure to build a high available, secure and scalable platform for digital donations. This platform is used during “3FM Serious Request”, the annual charity event organized by the Dutch radio station 3FM for the Dutch Red Cross.

This post will be about a new sample of using “Sandboxable”. We will walk through the steps to create a Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in that on deletion of any record, stores the deleted data as a file on Azure blob storage.

A while back I've introduced Sandboxable. It's a means to use NuGet packages that normally are not available for code that runs with Partial Trust. In this post, we will walk through the steps to create a Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in that will add a message to an Azure queue.

I would like to introduce to you Winvision’s first open source project: Sandboxable. Sandboxable enables your project to utilize functionality provided by other (Microsoft) libraries that normally are not available in a Partial Trust environment like the Microsoft Dynamics CRM sandbox process. The project offers modified NuGet packages that will run with Partial Trust.

With Windows Azure we can use Windows Azure SQL Database service (formerly known as SQL Azure) when we need a Relational Database. Microsoft offers a 99.9% monthly SLA for this service. But Microsoft doesn't provide you with the service to restore your data to a moment back in time when you (accidentally) delete of corrupt data. To have a backup in time I wrote some code to allow a Worker Role to backup my Windows Azure SQL Database every hour. Most solutions you find online are relying on the REST Endpoints but the address of the endpoint is different depending on which datacenter your database is hosted. I found a different solution where you only need the connection string to your database using the DacServices.

I am invited to speak at the Techdays 2013 in the Netherlands. The event is held on the 7th & 8th of March at the World Forum in Den Haag.

dotNed is the Dutch .NET user group and organizes several meetings each year for the .NET community. Maurice de Beijer interviewed me about my experiences using Windows Azure to build a high available and scaling platform for 3FM Serious Request.