Create a Windows 10 development virtual machine (Thomas Maurer) - Great tutorial to create a dev environment.So useful when we need to create a specific context or use a different version to investigate client issues.
Visual Studio 2022 (Amanda Silver) - I'm always impressed by how new features are continuously added to VS. Such a great tool.
Miscellaneous
Why you should never quit too early ... (Donn Felker) - An inspiring post to help us persevere and time is hard. But also to try to step aside and have an open mindset.
I wanted to create this tutorial for a long time. How to map a naked domain on an Azure resource. It looks so complicated, but once you know what to do it's kind of simple in fact. In this post, I will share the three simple steps to do exactly this.
Step 1: Add Custom Domain
The first step is to map a domain on the application. The method I will explain uses a "www" domain (ex: www.fboucher.dev). To map directly a naked domain (ex: fboucher.dev) you would need to buy a wildcard certificate. However, I will show you in step three how to walk around this issue by using DNS rules.
From the Azure portal, open the Azure Function or App Service. From the left menu search for "custom", click the Custom domains option. In this panel click the button Add custom domain, and enter your www domain.
Click the validate button and follow the instruction to make the connection between the App Service and your domain provider.
Step 2: Adding a Certificate
Now that your custom domain is mapped, let's fix the "not secure" warning by adding a certificate. From the Azure portal return in the App blade. Repeat the previous search for "custom", and select the option TLS/SSL settings. Click the Private Key Certificates, and the Create App Service Managed Certificate button. Select the domain previously added and saved. It will take a few moments to create the certificate.
Go back in the Custom domains blade and click the Add binding button. Select the domain and certificate, don't forget to select the SNI SSL option and click the Add Binding button.
Step 3: Create the DNS Rules
Create an account in cloudflare.com and add a site for your domain. We will need to customize the DNS and create some Page Rules.
On the cloudflare.com note the 2 nameservers addresses. Go to the origin name provider (in my case godaddy) and replace the names of the nameservers with the value found on cloudflare.
Create a rule that will redirect all the incoming traffic from the naked-domain to www.domain. On the option on the top, click the Pages Rules (B). Then Click the Button Create Page Rule
In the field for If the URL matches: enter the naked-domain follow by /*. That will match everything coming from that URL
For the settings select Forwarding URL and 301- Permanent Redirect. Then the destination URL should be https://www. with your domain and /$1.
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
6 Tools I use for Web Development (Jakob Klamser) - A nice list of great tools. I'm surprised to read that notion would be more flexible then OneNote, I heard a lot of good from it but never tried it.
Most solutions, if not all, are composed of multiple parts: backend, frontend, services, APIs, etc. Because all parts could have a different life-cycle it's important to be able to deploy them individually. However, sometimes we would like to deploy everything at once. It's exactly the scenario I had in a project I'm working on where with backend and one frontend.
In this post, I will explain how I use nested Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and conditions to let the user decide if he wants to deploy only the backend or the backend with a frontend of his choice. All the code will be available in GitHub and if you prefer, a video version is available below. (This post is also available in French)
The Context
The project used in this post my open-source budget-friendly Azure URL Shortener. Like mentioned previously the project is composed of two parts. The backend leverage Microsoft serverless Azure Functions, it a perfect match in this case because it will only run when someone clicks a link. The second part is a frontend, and it's totally optional. Because the Azure Functions are HTTP triggers they act as an API, therefore, they can be called from anything able to do an HTTP call. Both are very easily deployable using an ARM template by a PowerShell or CLI command or by a one-click button directly from GitHub.
The Goal
At the end of this post, we will be able from one-click to deploy just the Azure Functions or to deploy them with a frontend of our choice (I only have one right now, but more will come). To do this, we will modify the "backend" ARM template using condition and nest the ARM template responsible for the frontend deployment.
The ARM templates are available here in there [initial](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before) and [final](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before/after) versions.
Adding New Inputs
We will nest the ARM templates, this means that our backend template (azureDeploy.json) will call the frontend template (adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json). Therefore we need to add all the required information to azureDeploy.json to make sure it's able to deploy adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json successfully. Looking at the parameter required for the second template, we only two need values AdminEMail and AdminPassword. All the other can be generated or we already have them.
We will need also another parameter the will act as our selection option. So let's add a parameter named frontend and allowed only two values: none and adminBlazorWebsite. If the value is none we only deploy the Azure Function. When the value is adminBlazorWebsite we will deploy the Azure Function, of course, but we will also deploy an admin website to go with it.
Following the best practices, we add clear detail and add those three parameters in the parameters section of the ARM template
"frontend": {
"type": "string",
"allowedValues": [
"none",
"adminBlazorWebsite"
],
"defaultValue": "adminBlazorWebsite",
"metadata": {
"description": "Select the frontend that will be deploy. Select 'none', if you don't want any. Frontend available: adminBlazorWebsite, none. "
}
},
"frontend-AdminEMail": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) The EMail use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
},
"frontend-AdminPassword": {
"type": "securestring",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) Password use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
}
Nested Templates
Let's assume for now that we always deploy the website when we deploy the Azure Function, to keep things simple. What we need now is to used nested ARM template, and that when you deploy an ARM template from inside another ARM template. This is done with a Microsoft.Resources/deployments node. Let's look at the code:
If we examine this node, we have the classic: name, type, dependsOn, resourceGroup, apiVersion. Here We really want the Azure Functions to be fully deployed so we need the FunctionApp to be created AND the GitHub sync to be complete, this is why there is also a dependency on Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols.
In properties we will pass the mode as Incremental as it will leave unchanged resources that exist in the resource group but aren't specified in the template.
The second property is templateLink. This is really important as it's the URL to the other ARM template. That URI must not be a local file or a file that is only available on your local network. You must provide a URI value that downloadable as HTTP or HTTPS. In this case, it's a variable that contains the GitHub URL where the template is available.
Finally, we have the parameters, and this is how we pass the values to the second template. Let's skip those where I just pass the parameter value from the caller to the called, and focus on basename, AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl.
For basename I just add a prefix to the parameter basename received, this way the resource names will be different but we can still see the "connection". That's purely optional, you could have added this value in a parameter to azureDeploy.json, I prefer keeping the parameters a minimum as possible as I think it simplifies the deployment for the users.
Finally for AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl I needed to retrieve the URL of the Azure Function with the security token because they are secured. I do that by concatenating different parts.
Component
Value
Beginning of the URL
'https://'
Reference the Function App, return the value of hostname
Now that the second ARM template can be deployed, let's add a condition so it gets, indeed, deploy only when we desire. To do this it's very simple, we need to add a property condition.
In this case, is the value of the parameter is different then none, the nested template will be deployed. When a condition end-up being "false", the entire resource will be ignored during the deployment. How simple or complex are your conditions... that's your choice!
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. Enjoy!
Suggestion of the week
Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Wow! That's a very clever and impressive way to have step flow in GitHub. All the details are in the post if you would like to create your own.
GitHub with Azure DevOps | Premier Developer (GitHub with Azure DevOps) - Very interesting post that explains al the benefits of using this mixt, and why an enterprise would be interested to do that.
193: UI Is Messy (Merge Conflict) - I, once more, had a nice moment listening to that discussion/ argumentation about different patterns pros and cons.
