Author: Chad Michel
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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Finding Answers to Your Programming Questions
We all search the web for answers to our programming questions. Sometimes the answers are more engineering in nature, but sometimes it’s something simple. For example, how many columns can you put into a single table in SQL Server? The correct answer: 1,024. This led me to wonder how many columns you can put into…
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Generating Pre-signed URIs with Azure Blob Storage
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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Quick Look – Html Agility Pack
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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Multiple Azure Functions in the Same File
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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Uploading a Video from Angular to Amazon S3
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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Sending Messages to Azure Service Bus Queue Using Node.js
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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Giving Someone Access to Your AWS Account
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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