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Getting up to speed with Azure Cache for Redis

If you’re looking for a caching solution to help speed up a web application and Azure is your cloud platform of choice, it makes sense to use Azure Cache for Redis. Azure Cache for Redis is a secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-hosted caching solution. It is based on the very popular open-source Redis database cache…

Recording custom telemetry with Azure Application Insights

InWeb

Azure Application Insights is a powerful monitoring feature within the Azure cloud platform that can provide you with some pretty amazing insights into your web applications. By default, Application Insights captures a plethora of highly useful data points regarding both performance and user behaviour. The analysis of these metrics can assist you with speeding up…

Why your ASP.NET Core views are not updating at runtime

InWeb

If you have experience with ASP.NET but have only recently started building web applications with ASP.NET Core, you may have noticed that some of the features you are used to having during development, appear to be missing. One of the first things you are likely to notice when you start off with a new ASP.NET…

How to configure your ASP.NET Web Apps and APIs to require HTTPS

InSecurity

For any application which is hosted on the web, it is essential that security is built in from the start. Enabling your web application to serve secure traffic over HTTPS and enforcing this policy is one of the first things that you should implement and this is just as important for web apps as it…

Leveraging the DPAPI to encrypt sensitive configuration settings

InSecurity

It is very common that an application will need to store settings in a configuration file and then later retrieve the value of those settings. Quite often, one or more of these settings will be sensitive in nature; such as API keys, database connection strings, or perhaps mail server passwords. Protecting sensitive data is a…

SmtpClient is obsolete! The new way to send emails from your .NET app…

InProgramming

In the past, when you needed to send emails from a .NET app, the built-in SmtpClient class was typically the most appropriate tool for the job. However, for some time now the .NET Framework SmtpClient class has not been the recommended option for new development. In this article, I review how the .NET SmtpClient can…

SQL query things you keep forgetting

InSQL

When working with SQL databases, you may find there are things you need to do which although seemingly basic on the surface, are easy to forget due to nuances in query syntax and the required ordering of statements. For these situations, it is useful to have a working example to refer to which reminds you…

How to create and fire a SQL Server Trigger

InSQL

When implemented correctly, SQL Server Triggers are a powerful mechanism for adding useful functionality to a database without the need to change any application code. In this article, I look at what a SQL Server Trigger is, a template for defining a new Trigger and possible use cases. A few facts You may already be…

Protecting access to gRPC services with Auth0

InAPIs

Having already introduced the concept of gRPC services and having walked through how to consume a gRPC service using .NET Core, I’m now going to cover the next most fundamental topics; authentication and authorization. For production applications, your API endpoints are normally going to be available publicly and therefore they need to be protected from…

How to consume a gRPC service using .NET Core