Adrian Hall

Product Architect by day; Open-source developer by night

Because Developers are Awesome - page 4

Recent posts

Purge Azure API Management soft-deleted services with ease.

January 20, 2023  4 minute read  

I work a lot with Azure API Management, which means I turn up and down services quite a few times a day. Azure API Management has an awesome feature that prevents you from accidentally deleting a service, called soft-delete. Instead of immediately deleting the service, it marks it as soft deleted and purges it later on. Unfortunately, that means that you can’t immediately reuse that service name. In production, this is a great thing to have. In development, it turns into a pain. That’s b...

Type-checking Bicep arrays and objects

November 28, 2022  3 minute read  

As you may have guessed by now, I’m delving heavily into the world of Bicep right now, mostly in order to describe the infrastructure for my personal projects in a readable way. JSON and YAML (used by ARM) is most definitely not readable for the average consumer. Part of that work was learning about bicep modules, which I love for modularizing my code. However, there is one distinctive problem with this. Let’s take an example to show off the problem. I have a bicep fragment that looks li...

Bicep, loops, and defaults

November 21, 2022  3 minute read  

I’ve been playing around a lot with bicep recently. I like it because it is much more readable than ARM templates and lets me modularize my deployments easily. Recently, I was writing a module for creating named values in Azure API Management. Here is my service.bicep: @description('The name of the API Management instance to deploy this API to.') param serviceName string = 'apim${uniqueString(resourceGroup().id)}' @description('Location for all resources') param location string = resourc...

Top Ten things to consider when taking your GraphQL service into production

November 07, 2022  9 minute read  

It’s a somewhat well-known facet of development that we don’t consider production problems until it is too late in the development cycle. When we look at taking a Web API into production, we use API management solutions to provide protection, control, and visibility into our APIs so that we ensure we don’t get woken up by a production outage. The things we need to consider are well understood in APIs in general, but what about GraphQL? GraphQL is a developers dream when it comes to tooling....

Build a GraphQL API on Azure API Management using Bicep

October 10, 2022  5 minute read  

When I build a service in the cloud, I describe the infrastructure as a blob of code. There are lots of solutions out there for this. Azure has the Azure Resource Manager (or ARM), which has it’s own JSON or YAML format, for example. Terraform is cross-cloud capable, as is the Serverless Framework. Since I mostly work in Azure, these days, I’be been working more and more with Bicep for my Infrastructure as Code standard. Bicep uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources (much like ...

Azure Active Directory Authentication for Blazor WASM (Part 4: SignalR)

September 23, 2022  3 minute read  

I really thought I was through with Azure Active Directory! Honest! However, another key piece came up. My CloudMud is a real-time pub/sub application that uses SignalR. How do I authenticate to the SignalR connection? Well, like most things, there is a recipe. So let’s get to it. The Server side of things Let’s take a look at the unauthenticated version first. I need to integrate SignalR into my app. Fortunately, there is a tutorial for that. I just followed it. This involved: ...

Azure Active Directory Authentication for Blazor WASM (Part 3: Production)

September 03, 2022  12 minute read  

Recently, I’ve been working on integrating authentication with Azure Active Directory into my Blazor app. I’ve covered the server side and the client side, so what’s left? Well, firstly, I left “secrets” in my client app in the form of an appsettings.json file. They aren’t exactly secret values, but having specific values in there means I can’t have different values for different environments. Similarly, I can’t change those values over time - I have to re-build the app in order to change...

Azure Active Directory Authentication for Blazor WASM (Part 2: The Client)

September 02, 2022  7 minute read  

I’m in the middle of adding authentication to my Blazor WASM app. In the last article, I introduced the service side of things to consider when integrating Azure Active Directory authentication. It’s now time to complete the work by considering the Blazor WASM client. As there was last time, this is [well documented], but comes with some wrinkles when you consider bringing authentication into an app later. I’ve got a Sign-in button called AuthButton.razor that looks like this: <button...

Azure Active Directory Authentication for Blazor WASM (Part 1: The Server)

September 01, 2022  8 minute read  

Continuing my foray into Blazor WASM, I decided to tackle authentication. The Microsoft documentation has an excellent article on how to do this using the built-in tooling to create an AAD-enabled Blazor WASM application. However, I’m beyond the tooling at this point. My Blazor app is created. I need to augment the solution with the right code to enable authentication. I also want to make sure that I am not leaking secrets and the same code will work from development, through staging, to...

Building Stylesheets for Blazor with SASS

August 26, 2022  8 minute read  

As I mentioned in my last article, I’m building a cloud-based MUD using all the modern techniques that I have available to me. One of the things I decided was that I was going to use an ASP.NET Core application hosting a single-page web application written in Blazor and I’m going to be running that inside a Docker image so I can deploy it onto Azure Container Apps. Scaffolding the app out is easy: $ mkdir cloudmud $ cd cloudmud $ dotnet new blazorwasm $ .\cloudmud.sln This opens up Visual...