Author: Chad Michel

Why Azure Functions? Azure Functions provide a quick spot to drop some simple service code. Think of them as services without the hassle. No VS projects. No builds. Just go. Azure Functions are not a great technology for everything, but for services that contain simple logic they are probably okay. The biggest drawback to Azure…

/* This post is part of a series about what we cover in our Software Design and Development Clinics, a 1-week series of classes where we dive into various aspects of software design and development principles. Legacy application migration is a core focus of this class. Learn more at http://dontpaniclabs.com/education/. */ We have never done any…

We have gone through quite a bit of Azure Cosmos-related posts the last few weeks, but we have skipped over the concept of partition keys in almost of the queries we have covered. Ignoring the partition key is probably fine for these small data sets, but for real workloads we should probably think this through….

In my first post, we performed some really basic CRUD queries against Azure Cosmos DB. In my second post, we went a little deeper and refined our queries. In this post, we are going to be using SQL to query Cosmos. Yep, SQL. First, we will rewrite our count method. Previously, we did something that…

Our first post covering Azure Cosmos DB was pretty basic. If you noticed, our READ query was always returning all results. So even if we wanted to find a single item, we had to return all of the items. That plan has obvious problems. If we look at the code below, we can see that…

.NET Core 2.0 is finally out, which finally closes the loop and create a very usable .NET Core. This quick blog post is a quick start for .NET Core 2.0. 1. Install VS Code. 2. Install .NET Core 2.0. 3. Fire up terminal. 4. Create a new solution. 5. Create a console application. 6. Add…

Cosmos – κόσμος – the world, universe – John Jeffrey Dodson Lexicon (public domain) Cosmos means the entire world, so I wonder if Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s view of the entire world for data stores going forward. Sure, blob storage will have some particular advantages and SQL server will have some advantages too. But…

We are a software design and development shop. So when asked which tech stack we prefer we’ll always give some answer around our the preference for the Microsoft stack. We tend to use C# / .NET for most code writing, SQL Server for databases, and Azure for cloud storage. However, we recently undertook a PHP…