Because Developers are Awesome - page 5

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...

Building a serverless MUD infrastructure in Azure

August 25, 2022 12 minute read

If you went to college back in the 1980’s or 90’s and studied computer science, then it is likely you bumped into the MUD (multi-user dungeon) craze. Back then, computer science was different. The primary languages were the languages of the day - Pascal and C were big. We had access to UNIX systems and would write text-based multi-user games that users would telnet into to get access. We didn’t have the web back then. I learned a lot from writing a MUD - from parser design to network comm...

Building repositories for Azure Mobile Apps with ASP.NET 6

November 12, 2021 7 minute read

Over the last four days, I’ve delved into how to build a data sync service using Azure Mobile Apps on ASP.NET Core 6. I’ve covered the template, authentication, authorization, and logging. The basic setup is really good when you have a 1:1 relationship between the table and the DTO and you don’t need to do anything special, like support a non-EF Core ORM, or integrate real-time alerting. There are all sorts of reasons you don’t want to use the standard repository. So you get to write your...

Logging and Options for Azure Mobile Apps with ASP.NET 6

November 11, 2021 2 minute read

Over the past three articles, I’ve covered a lot of the ins and outs of a typical Azure Mobile Apps service. I’ve covered scaffolding, authentication, and complex authorization. There are just a few more topics to cover on the basic cases. Logging One of the big areas is logging. You obviously want to see what the library is doing when it is running, especially because it is running unattended all the time. Fortunately, it’s an ASP.NET Core application, which means logging is built-in. ...

Controlled access for Azure Mobile Apps for ASP.NET Core

November 10, 2021 5 minute read

In the last two articles, I’ve gone over how you can create a basic datasync service and add authentication to the service. What if you want to do something more complex? Authorization that is an on/off switch is reasonable as a first pass, but rarely allows you to handle the cases you actually need to implement. Introducing the Access Control Provider To handle cases where your needs are a little more complex, we’ve introduced a new interface: IAccessControlProvider<T>. This requi...

Adrian Hall