From 0 to 100 in 30 minutes - IoT with C#

My interest for the Internet of Things (IoT) was sparked many moons ago, way before the name was born. Back in the days I wrote software for PalmOS devices, and I was intrigued by having raw processor power in my Pocket. Don’t get me wrong, back then we where talking Megahertz instead of Gigahertz and Kilobyte instead of Gigabyte. Having such limitations in processing power and memory tickled my creativity. When I had the opportunity to control hardware (gps, electronic locks etc) using the little devices I was sold. Fastforward to a couple of years ago when the market was flooded with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, I picked up an old hobby and started developing again, this time playing around with sensors. The big disadvantage was that you had to resort to plain old C and a crippled development environment, until now…

Running a persistent SQL Server in Docker

In IT we always want to work with the latest and greatest, it’s in our DNA to explore new technologies. From time-to-time you get confronted with legacy technologies, robust but boring. One of such things is a piece of software I wrote more than 15 years ago for a friend. It was an application using a SQL Server database that controlled a couple of weighing terminals connected over RS232. Controlling machines is every geek’s dream. Every couple of years my friend asks me if I can help him to improve the software I wrote for him, this time it was no different.

Note to self: localhost in kestrel is localhost

In one of the projects I’m involved in, I ran into a problem. In this project we are building a solution that is running on a Linux based Edge Device connected to Azure. On the Edge device, a k3s cluster hosts a number of services required by the solution. In order to be able to develop and debug on a Linux environment, I equiped my system with Hyper-V, an internal NAT switch and a fresh copy of Ubuntu.

Sometimes you need to reboot...

Almost a year ago I created this blog… I mean not exactly this blog, but its predecessor “blog.somethingazure.com”. I thought that the name did match the content. Fast Forward a couple of months in time…. I learned that my job as Azure Coding Architect involved quite a few more technology areas than just Azure. Furthermore I was not happy with the look-and-feel of the blog; it was visually not attractive. Time for a major overhaul!

Multi-staged GitHub Pipeline

At the moment I’m working on some infrastructure pipelines to build and deploy Azure infrastructure for one of our clients. For me a cool project as I’m learning to work with technologies such as Bicep and GitHub actions. In this project we use GitHub actions for the CI/CD process. In this process every time a pull request is merged in the main branch, an automated build, test and deployment process is triggered.

Certification Renewal

When Microsoft introduced the new role based certifaction paths, a new expiration policy was set as well. After two years (as of july 2021, one year) the certification will expire, and you have to renew it in order to keep it.

At the time, I was among the first people who passed the new certifications and back then the new expiration policy was unclear. There was no information on how to renew the certifications and costs involved, until a few weeks ago…

DevOps All the Way

In Practice what you preach I wrote that I decided to host my blog on the Azure platform, using Hugo as content management system, Blob Storage and Azure CDN for hosting the blog. The only thing lacking is a workflow of writing content, approving it and publishing it on the web.

As I work for a company that specialized on Azure and DevOps, I decided to take the plunge and go DevOps all the way. Doing some googling, I found out that there were some great tutorials out there to use an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline in combination with Hugo to compile and publish the blog. As a starter I followed this writing by kurtmkurtm.