Although Eric Wastl has been organizing the Advent of Code since 2015. I only discovered it recently when some colleagues invited me to join the 2021 edition.

Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

About

During the first 25 days of December, the challenges made me (re)discover many possibilities with C#, some that are long available but maybe not that well known.

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.

Last week I received an invitation for a social work meeting about “Pixel art in spreadsheets”.

I thought: “How hard can it be?”.

Well, it is about 25 lines of C# 9.0 hard! 😀

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.

Capturing images in your applications with the VideoCapture class of the EmguCV library (an OpenCV wrapper for dotnet) requires supplying an index value to choose a specific camera.
However, finding this number can be challenging, and since it can change over time, it might cause your application to break.

In this article, I will demonstrate how to use the actual name of the camera instead of the index value with OpenCV’s VideoCapture class.