One of the nice touches of Bicep are some of the helpers it provides you, specifically the environment() helper. This provides information such as Azure endpoints to save you hard-coding it. In my recent journey in to deploying SQL Database, I wanted to output the connection string. Naturally, I did what I do with ARM which is build up the connection string myself, as below: output MyConnecti...

One of the nice touches of Bicep are some of the helpers it provides you, specifically the environment() helper. This provides information such as Azure endpoints to save you hard-coding it. In my recent journey in to deploying SQL Database, I wanted to output the connection string. Naturally, I...

I was working on a Bicep script that would deploy an Azure SQL database server and a database. Below is an excerpt of the file with the relevant pieces: resource server 'Microsoft.Sql/servers@2021-02-01-preview' = { name: 'server${appname}${envtype}' location: resourceGroup().location properties:{ administratorLogin: 'adminuser' administratorLoginPassword...

I was working on a Bicep script that would deploy an Azure SQL database server and a database. Below is an excerpt of the file with the relevant pieces: resource server 'Microsoft.Sql/servers@2021-02-01-preview' = { name: 'server${appname}${envtype}' location: resourceGroup(...

First thing first, I am really enjoying using Bicep. The intellisense is the real difference between that and something like Terraform, it makes discovery so much easier and creates a real flow to building Bicep files. The ability to get an ARM JSON file out of the Bicep script is also proving really useful when something isn’t working to figure out what I am doing wrong. I thought I’d just s...

First thing first, I am really enjoying using Bicep. The intellisense is the real difference between that and something like Terraform, it makes discovery so much easier and creates a real flow to building Bicep files. The ability to get an ARM JSON file out of the Bicep script is also proving r...

Following Part 1, thought i’d write part 2 before I forgot/lost interest in doing so. In this part, I am just going to show a few examples of Terraform resources and the Bicep equivalents, including how I worked out what the Bicep equivalent was. For all of my editing, I am using VS Code with the HashiCorp Terraform and Bicep extensions. Storage Account Terraform resource "azurerm_stor...

Following Part 1, thought i’d write part 2 before I forgot/lost interest in doing so. In this part, I am just going to show a few examples of Terraform resources and the Bicep equivalents, including how I worked out what the Bicep equivalent was. For all of my editing, I am using VS Code with t...

In what will hopefully be a multi-part series of posts, I’ll go over Terraform vs Bicep and cover translating a Terraform file to Bicep and cover the challenges I experience doing this and my thoughts as I go. What is Terraform? Terraform is a product from HashiCorp that provides a common way to build infrastructure and manipulate systems. It uses HashiCorp Common Language (HCL) and has a prov...

In what will hopefully be a multi-part series of posts, I’ll go over Terraform vs Bicep and cover translating a Terraform file to Bicep and cover the challenges I experience doing this and my thoughts as I go. What is Terraform? Terraform is a product from HashiCorp that provides a common way to...

I’ve been thinking for a while about writing this post and some recent realisations in my professional life has spurred me on to finally do it. This is just my view and my way of working. Your mileage may vary. Why documenting what you know benefits everyone. So why document what you know? As people in the tech profession, especially as part of a multi-discipline team (i.e. not just pure dev...

I’ve been thinking for a while about writing this post and some recent realisations in my professional life has spurred me on to finally do it. This is just my view and my way of working. Your mileage may vary. Why documenting what you know benefits everyone. So why document what you know? As ...

Fortify is a really useful tool for scanning your code and reducing the chance of bugs or vulnerabilities making their way in to production. They even provide Azure DevOps tasks for integrating submitting your code in to your build pipelines. The documentation for how to actually set the whole process up is pretty poor to non-existent so below is what I did to get it working which I hope will ...

Fortify is a really useful tool for scanning your code and reducing the chance of bugs or vulnerabilities making their way in to production. They even provide Azure DevOps tasks for integrating submitting your code in to your build pipelines. The documentation for how to actually set the whole p...

As I write this post, it is 4 days until Chromium begins enforcing the new SameSite rules again. When they first did this in March, it caused a number of issues including breaking website integrations with some payment gateways. If you’re on .Net 4.7 or higher, Microsoft supports setting SameSite to None. The official recommendation is that if you want to use SameSite None, then you need to m...

As I write this post, it is 4 days until Chromium begins enforcing the new SameSite rules again. When they first did this in March, it caused a number of issues including breaking website integrations with some payment gateways. If you’re on .Net 4.7 or higher, Microsoft supports setting SameSi...

This is an update to my last API head to head from August 2014, I’m nothing if not consistent with my inconsistent posting. I’ve recently changed jobs to a new company that is moving to Azure but has some legacy Rackspace assets, so I thought it’d be fun to redo the test with Rackspace added. Worth noting that the Rackspace support for C# is completely non-existent. The official Rackspace SDK h...

This is an update to my last API head to head from August 2014, I’m nothing if not consistent with my inconsistent posting. I’ve recently changed jobs to a new company that is moving to Azure but has some legacy Rackspace assets, so I thought it’d be fun to redo the test with Rackspace added. Wor...

As part of a recent feature, we needed to implement conversion of docx to pdf. A quick look on Nuget revealed Free Spire.Doc for .Net. We thought this looked like a great use case for Azure Functions, so the member of the team who was implementing the feature quickly implemented this as an Azure Function, but when we deployed it, it didn’t work. After a bit of googling, the cause of this was th...

As part of a recent feature, we needed to implement conversion of docx to pdf. A quick look on Nuget revealed Free Spire.Doc for .Net. We thought this looked like a great use case for Azure Functions, so the member of the team who was implementing the feature quickly implemented this as an Azure ...