Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
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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Visualizing Data in Angular Applications with Chart.js
Charting is something we often do in the software we develop. While it isn’t difficult, it can take more work than you might think. In this blog post, we will create some very simple charts using Chart.js. Assuming we already have an Angular application, we can install Chart.js using npm. npm install chart.js Now let’s…
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Publishing Azure Functions from JetBrains Rider
You probably shouldn’t deploy straight from JetBrains Rider to an environment within Azure. Doing so might get you into a bad situation, or at least setting yourself up for a bad situation. But there are a couple of scenarios where this might be useful. The first is if you are building a throwaway prototype and…
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Using Screen Recordings in Your Pull Request Process
With the increasing efficiency demands on today’s developers, the Pull Request (PR) process can benefit from a visual demonstration of the changes. The importance of effective communication, thorough testing, and seamless knowledge transfer becomes increasingly evident. One powerful tool that encapsulates these elements is screen recording. Integrating screen recordings into the PR process is an…
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Getting Started with LM Studio
Many large language models (LLMs) provide features similar to ChatGPT. These custom models offer several benefits. For example, you can host them yourself, which could benefit some projects and environments. And there are models tuned for particular use cases, like coding or text processing. And then, some models are great for providing chatbot experiences in…
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Using AWS Cognito with Google Authentication
Adding social authentication to your application should be pretty simple. And if you started with AWS Cognito, adding something like Google authentication is straightforward. In this post, we will add Google authentication to an existing AWS Cognito User Pool. To configure your Google identity provider, we will need Client ID, a Client Secret, and an…
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Creating and Running a Docker Container: A Step-by-Step Guide
Running a Docker container locally is a convenient method for packaging and deploying applications. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the step-by-step process of running a Docker container from an ASP.NET Core project directory. This guide covers installing Docker, creating a Docker image, running the container, and accessing the application endpoint. Let’s dive in!…
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