Did you ever feel the need to run some pieces of code while building your workflows using Azure Logic Apps, and you quickly realized that you need to use and connect something else with your workflow, such as Azure Functions?

But of course, besides the fact that Azure Functions is amazing to run pieces of code, you still need to create a Function App, store your code in a repo (in case you are working as team, in your company, etc..), build a pipeline to deploy your code, maybe generate some ARM templates to follow the Infrastructure as Code principle, and create/configure your Function App while deploying your code.

So, does it really worth all these steps, to run small pieces of code with simple logic? Probably not.
Fortunately, the Azure Logic Apps’ team introduced an action named Inline Code, that enables us to run simple and small pieces of code, using Javascript, inside our Logic Apps’ workflows. This action is still in Preview mode, but you should be able to easily use it.

The Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals Certification enables you to learn all the core concepts and fundamentals you need to get started on Power Platform. By getting this certification, you will learn how to improve productivity by automating business processes, analyze data to produce business insights, and act more effectively by creating simple app experiences.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning path to get this certification.

Today, the Cloud Lunch and Learn team is celebrating the first month of existence. It has been an amazing experience, working together with the community, to deliver online sessions related to the Cloud. This post is to memorize this mark, as a sign of hope, to be the first of many months promoting collaboration in the communities, connect and enable community members to work together, especially the ones that did not work together before.

Also, I want to share with you some information about this initiative, in case you did not hear about it.

Intro

As part of my plan to start studying for the Microsoft certification Azure IoT Developer Specialty, I decided to start to play around with some tools and sample projects to build simple IoT applications.

So, I started by do some research in order to understand which tools usually other techs would use to build their IoT applications. And then, I realized that Microsoft has a IoT DevKit available to allow you to easily build your first IoT application. Consequently, I just ordered my DevKit from Amazon, and started to do some experiments with it, by testing some of the sample projects available on their Github workspace.

This post is part of the Applied Cloud Stories initiative, promoted by Microsoft, to allow the community to share success stories using Azure services and products and help other people learn how they can also use it to overcome challenges and issues that eventually they face, or just for improve in any way their life and business.

Few years ago, when I started to work with one of my clients, between an extensive number of important projects, there was a initiative being implemented by the team to redesign our work processes and improve productivity and quality of our applications and the services we provide.

So we decided to adopt Azure DevOps to mitigate some pain points we were facing at that time.

During the Microsoft Ignite 2019, organized in Orlando - Florida from 4th to 8th November, Mark Russinovich, the Azure CTO, presented two innovative and revolutionary projects developed by Microsoft that aim to solve a bunch of existing problems nowadays for IT Pros and Developers when they try to build distributed microservice-based applications. This session was named “The Future of Cloud Native Applications with Open Application Model (OAM) and Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)”.

During December of 2019, two Azure MVPs, Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper are running an amazing initiative called the Azure Advent Calendar. From 1st of December to 25th of December, each day you will have available at least three (3) Azure related videos from Azure community members posted to this YouTube Channel. These videos are for those new to Azure and all the way through to the expert level. This initiative enables you to access relevant Azure content in an easy and quick way for you to get new or refresh your knowledge on some of these services. I highly recommend you to check it out.

And I am pleased to be part of this initiative, with a collaboration of a video talking about Azure Cognitive Services. In this video, I am presenting an overview of the different Cognitive Services available. Then, I iterate each of these services, and explain what features it provides you, and in which kind of scenarios you could use each of these services.

Then, I explain you how you can manage and use these services, by leveraging the APIs and SDKs available.

Last, I explain the main differences between Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning, and in which scenarios you should use one or other.

I hope you enjoy the video, and in case you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me.

And Merry Christmas to all of us. 🎅

Today, I proudly announce that my first Pluralsight course was published. This course is related with Azure SQL database services and explains you how you can leverage Azure features and services to monitor your database performance, troubleshoot any issues that occur and tune your database performance, in a simple and easy way, that allows you to achieve the best performance on your databases.

Preparation

Since it is my first course, I will share with you all the experience and some lessons learned during the process of producing this course.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to talk to the Azure Dublin Meetup community about Leveraging Azure Serverless to build Event-driven Applications. It was an amazing opportunity to share some of my knowledge related to Azure and also explain how it can be used in real life scenarios that we face on day a day basis. There was a really nice audience, committed to learn and share their experience and knowledge as well, including few Microsoft staff that contributed to the different discussions.

Prerequisites

• Install dotnet core 3 SDK latest version
• Install Blazor templates by executing the following command on the command-line: dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates
• Install Visual Studio 2019 or higher, enabling the component bundles related to ASP.NET & Web Development and the Blazor extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace

Introduction

Microsoft released the stable release (3.0.0) of the dotnet core 3 framework on September 2019. This version of the framework brought amazing features including support for C# 8 and Blazor framework. For the full list of features released, please visit this Microsoft’s announcement.

Blazor is a programming framework that allows you to build web applications using client-side or server-side paradigms.
You can build your Blazor app using client-side template and running it as WebAssembly code. WebAssembly allows it to access the full functionality of the browser via Javascript interop. The code is compiled and encoded in a size and load-time-efficient binary format.

Yesterday, the .NET Mafia, C# Mobsters and other Microsoft family community hosted an amazing event related with Microservices. The event had three speakers, and I had the pleasure to be one of the speakers. The first speaker - Ferdinando Aprovitolo - explained how to and all the benefits of using gRPC framework to ensure high performance on the communications of microservices. Then, I explained how you can leverage Service Mesh to enhance communications and governance of microservices. The third speaker - Diego Tondim - finalized the presentations by explaining how you gain insights of your microservices with Elastic APM.

This article is not meant to explain to you all the process to configure HTTPS on an Azure CDN custom domain because you can get all this information in this tutorial provided by Microsoft.

The main goal of this article is to share an experience while trying to configure it, and when things do not go in the way you expect.

Context

First of all, in case you are planning to do this configuration process, or if you want to be aware of it, I would invite you to read this tutorial, so you can understand the rest of this article.

As the tutorial says, when you request to enable HTTPS to a given custom domain on your Azure CDN endpoint, there is a validation process that will be performed to ensure the ownership of that custom domain.

If the custom domain is a new domain, then you can create a CNAME record, in your DNS provider, that maps the custom domain to the CDN endpoint’s hostname. Then the validation will be performed automatically by DigitCert.

If the custom domain is being used in a Live application, then you need to use a different approach, creating a CNAME record that maps your custom domain and the CDN endpoint, but with the inclusion of the keyword cdnverify. And in this scenario, DigitCert will query WHOIS the registrant information of the custom domain, to send an email asking to approve the validation request. If the registrant information is private, it sends an email to one of the following emails: