Blog

Discover DevToys – Making your daily developer tasks easier

Recently I came across a tool for Windows that has helped to improve my productivity as a software developer. The tool is called DevToys and it is a very slick and polished, yet simple and streamlined app that is packed full of features. If you constantly find yourself searching for online encoders and hash generators,…

How to create and install a .NET Core Windows Service

InProgramming

Windows Services offer a robust mechanism for hosting long-running background applications on Windows devices. These services are usually configured to start with the operating system and can be stopped and started on demand. They are ideal for processing background tasks as they do not show a user interface and therefore do not interfere with what…

Publishing your first C# Azure Function using Visual Studio

InAPIs Web

In my previous post, I introduced Azure Functions and walked through the process of creating and debugging your first C# function using Visual Studio. This time, I’m covering the topic of deployment and how functions can be published to Azure. After reading this article, you’ll understand how to publish an Azure Function to Azure using…

Creating your first C# Azure Function using Visual Studio

InAPIs Programming Web

Azure Functions is an Azure cloud service that allows software developers to focus on writing code that reacts to events, without needing to concern themselves as much with the infrastructure that the code is running on. Azure Functions applications are serverless by nature and can scale to meet demand with minimal overhead and cost. There…

How to update Azure Web App TLS/SSL bindings in bulk using PowerShell

InScripting Security Web

If you have an Azure Web App with multiple custom domains and you want to enable TLS (Transport Layer Security), you’ll need to add a TLS/SSL certificate binding for each hostname. These bindings can be configured individually via the Azure Portal web interface. However, if the number of hostnames is large, updating the TLS/SSL binding…

Generating secure signed licenses using C# and Standard.Licensing

InProgramming Security

When it comes to licensing software that is installed on an end user’s device, one of the most secure approaches that we can take as software developers, is to generate and subsequently validate a digitally signed license. With this approach, a cryptographically secure public/private key pair is created that is specific to the software being…

Base64 URL encoding using C#

InProgramming Web

Base64 is an encoding scheme that allows binary data to be converted to text and back again. It is useful in a wide variety of scenarios and makes it easier to transfer and store data in many cases. This is especially true in a web context where everything tends to be based on text content…

Using NCache as your distributed ASP.NET Core caching store

InProgramming

NCache is an open-source, in-memory, distributed cache written in .NET and usable by several different languages and frameworks. A distributed cache pools together memory from one or more servers into a single data store that can be accessed from a consuming application that is typically hosted on another server. The cache can be used to…

.NET Error – The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

InSecurity

When using a .NET application that communicates with a web server, you may encounter the following error. The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel. This exception message typically indicates that a secure channel could not be created due to the client application failing to specify a cryptographic protocol that is supported by…

Send a Mailgun email via PowerShell

InScripting

Mailgun is a popular email delivery service that is built for developers and combines high reliability with scalability. PowerShell is a cross-platform scripting language that allows tasks to be automated on Windows, Linux, and macOS using the power of .NET. When developing PowerShell scripts that are running automatically on a schedule, it’s often useful to…