It is common to have files stored in Azure Blob storage, but we occasionally need to allow others to access those files. Sometimes we need to allow someone to upload a file; other times, we need to allow someone to download a file. Either way, we usually only want to allow partial control of the…
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Software projects often come down to transforming data from one format to another. A common situation involves extracting some data from HTML. This can occur when transferring data from a legacy system, and the best way to do it is screen scraping. There are a variety of options available when screen scraping, but a really…
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Azure Functions are very useful for hosting APIs in the cloud or for responding to asynchronous events in our cloud systems. Azure Functions also have a nice pricing model for startups; they can be priced on a per-consumption basis which can reduce monthly costs until you start to get real usage, which often takes longer…
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The ability to upload files from HTML applications has existed for a long time. But in many modern scenarios, we are uploading very large files such as videos, and they are potentially uploading to a cloud blob technology such as Amazon S3. In this blog post, we are going to upload a file to S3…
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Injection tokens are a popular way of providing dependencies in Angular. They are used to provide a value, such as a service instance or a configuration setting, to a component or other part of the application. Below is a simple example of setting up an injection token and using it. Suppose you have a constant…
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Azure Service Bus is an excellent glue technology that we can use to handle the communication between our subsystems. We often use Azure Service Bus as the “queue” between our subsystems, which works great. We usually build our backend systems using C#/.NET, but what if we need to send a message using Node.js? Node.js is…
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What are secrets, and why would you want to use them? Secrets are hidden configuration values that are not checked into source control or deployed. These commonly include values such as passwords, API keys, and certificates. In .NET Core, Microsoft provides a package to set up secrets on the level of individual projects. These secrets…
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Sometimes you need to let someone else configure your AWS account for you. There are two options. One option is to create an IAM user with AdministratorAccess, and the second would be to use AWS IAM Identity Center. In this blog post, we will cover using the IAM user option. Visit https://console.aws.amazon.com to access your…
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AWS Cognito is an identity provider we can use to manage users in our systems. Cognito supports a simple oauth2 sign-in flow. Following this flow makes it pretty straightforward for users to sign in or sign up. Before doing anything else, you must create an AWS Cognito user pool in the AWS Console. For this…
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Before hosting a video, you usually need to encode it into bitrates that perform well for various situations. AWS has Elemental MediaConvert, a service that generates videos for online distribution. When you first get started, a wall of options emerges. But when you walk through the wall, it isn’t that bad. First, we have to…
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