Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
LINQ Functions in C# with an SQLite Database
While writing a query to filter some data from a database using LINQ, I ran into an issue. My query ran correctly, and all my data was populating correctly in the browser. However, when I went to write tests, even the simplest test gave me this error. The error is pretty simple: SQLite does not…
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Using an Access Control List to Block IP Addresses from Cognito
AWS Cognito is a very solid authentication service. We often use Cognito as an identity provider (IdP) for the applications we build. We redirect to Cognito, and then Cognito redirects back to us. Cognito gives us a code that we can use to get a JSON Web Token (JWT) to access our services. It’s a…
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How to Send GCM Messages Using C#
In my previous blog post, I mentioned how to send APNS messages using C#. In this post, I will do the same using GCM. Sending a GCM message is very similar, but in this case we will use a different NuGet package. You will need to install the FirebaseAdmin NuGet package. The first step of…
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Sending APNS Push Notifications Using C#
Over the years, we have built many mobile applications across numerous industries. One of the most common features of these mobile applications is sending push notifications. Most applications we have built have used third-party services to send these notifications. But how hard is it to send APNS notifications? It’s really not that hard. But why…
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Cognito Basic User Operations in C#
When building a solution on top of Cognito, we will often build on top of the existing Cognito user interface. But, it is possible to make all of the authentication calls without using it in a UI. In this blog post, I’ll show how to use C# to make these calls. You probably should avoid…
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Rate-Limiting Requests with RxJS
Recently, I had an issue in a front-end application in which a user was allowed to click around a calendar and begin loading any day that was tapped. Each day triggered a semi-expensive API call, which could take a second or two to complete. The user was free to click around on more days and…
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Setting Up User and Password Verification with Cognito
With most solutions, we want to use an IDP (Identity Provider) to manage users. This almost always involves redirecting to a hosted web page to handle user authentication. After the user is authenticated, they are redirected back to our web application. That is a preferred way to handle this problem, mostly because it keeps us…
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Searching Text in C# Using Embeddings with OpenAI
The problem we’re solving today is semantic searching text in C#, using tools provided by OpenAI. A semantic search in this instance refers to searching on the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of the query, rather than a simple keyword lookup (for example, search results for “king” may include matches on the word “monarch”)….
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Using Microsoft CoPilot to Create API Contracts from Other Smaller Contracts
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”― Bill Gates Problem We have an established API with a lot of existing functionality. Part of that functionality was the ability to build up requests that could be posted to external APIs for…
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Upgrading a .NET 6 Function App API to .NET 8 Web API
A while ago, we decided to use an Azure Function App as a Web Api. That was when .NET 6 was new. That filter was used to handle some events around the function methods security. Let’s not dwell on if that …
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