Author: Chad Michel
Building a Chat System – Part 6
In this series on building a chat system, we have gone through many parts that make up chat applications using Azure Chat. How all this works together may be a little difficult to follow. There are a lot of pieces, and it might not be obvious what each piece is doing. The Frontend – This…
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Building a Chat System – Part 5
So far on our journey to build a chat system, we’ve covered setting up the Ionic framework, creating a user in Azure Chat, adding the ability to store more messages, and implementing a way to censor offensive words. Now we will cover actually interacting with Azure Chat. Azure Chat isn’t a full-blown component you drop…
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Building a Chat System – Part 4
In our journey to build a chat system, we’ve covered setting up the Ionic framework, creating a user in Azure Chat, and adding the ability to store more messages. Now it’s time to clean up our language. With any chat solution, you run the risk of communication creating some points of conflict. One of those…
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Using Azure Table Storage
Azure Storage tables are simple; they’re basically rows and columns. Storage tables can be used to store data much like you would with Azure SQL. While Azure SQL has more features, there is something nice about the simplicity of Storage tables. Once you get your data into storage tables, you will likely need to see…
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Building a Chat System – Part 3
If you’ve been following my series on building a chat system inside a mobile app, you’ve seen as I set up my Ionic framework and created a user in Azure Chat. Now it’s time to build the ability to store message data. We wouldn’t need to necessarily store all messages, but by doing so we…
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Sending Emails with Azure Communication Services
Sending emails is a pretty known technical space. Many of us have sent emails using a variety of services. One you maybe haven’t tried is Azure Communication Services, which is still in preview at the time of this blog post. Here’s how you set up Azure Communications to send emails from your applications. Create a…
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Working With Stripe’s SDK
Stripe is an e-commerce solution for supporting payments in your web applications. Integrating Stripe into your application is almost too easy, and their integrations put a very low barrier upon the integration. While their integration is easy and fast, you still do have to write some code to tie your system to the information in…
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Building a Chat System – Part 2
In my previous post, we discussed setting up an Ionic front end to host chat functionality in an app. In this post, we will discuss creating a user in Azure chat. We will then create a token that the front end can use to send messages as this user. It is important to note that…
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Building a Chat System – Part 1
Chat applications are very common, especially in many larger applications. Building a chat application from scratch isn’t recommended in most cases because there are frameworks that make building them easier. In this blog post series, I will create a very simple chat application using Azure Communication Services. To start, we will create a rough front…
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Build vs. Buy: How to Decide When Adding Features to Your Software Project
Creating new software involves a lot of decisions. When adding features, a common question is whether to write custom code or buy an existing product. There isn’t a straightforward right or wrong answer. Many people will tell you there is, but that is too simplistic. Many factors can influence the decision. How capable is the…
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