This tag contains all of my blog posts that directly concern Microsoft Azure.
But what is Microsoft Azure? Microsoft themselves describe it like this:
Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It’s the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/overview/what-is-azure)
Marketing talk aside, Azure offers developers a way to get going fast, and concentrate on the functionality and added value instead of worrying about the infrastructure. Well, worrying about most of it anyway.
For IT Pros, it offers a new can of worms, a huge set of tools to squash those worms, and opportunities to offer a lot of value to their organizations.
For business people, Azure offers big potential savings. And the blockchain. And machine learning. And IoT, of course. It’s the hybrid cloud solution for your modern, blockchain-backed, machine learning -powered workloads running on the intelligent edge.
Does that sound good to you? No? Well, scratch the last paragraph – it’s true, but not as bad as it sounds!
Yikes – ever ran into this error after deploying your ASP.NET Core web application to an Azure App Service? Yeah, me too. And when it’s a production deployment, and the error didn’t happen in test/QA environment, that’s even more fun. This article describes a couple of ways to fix it, though. You wouldn’t believe these 3 solutions to fix the error “500.32”, and what they look like now! Oh heavens,…Continue reading How to fix “HTTP Error 500.32 – ANCM Failed to Load dll”
This article will briefly explain the different NuGet package versioning schemes – both automatic and manual – available. Then we’ll take a look at how to implement a nifty, and quite frankly, downright elegant automatic versioning scheme for your NuGet packages. Okay – returning from quite a trip down another rabbit hole, I think it’s a good time to document some of my findings in regards to Azure DevOps NuGet…Continue reading Fun with Azure DevOps NuGet package versioning!
So, another interesting issue I ran into when developing Azure Functions locally. What an endless bag of funsies! 😁 This time, the issue was simple but infuriating – my Azure Functions host would just silently close when debugging: none of the breakpoints would be hit, no information would be logged anywhere. Azure Functions Core Tools (2.4.432 Commit hash: 3371a87e0fce2aa35986c0de8e77d5d618163b91) Function Runtime Version: 2.0.12332.0 The system cannot find the file specified…Continue reading Azure Functions host quits with “The system cannot find the file specified”
I don’t know about you, but it’s happened to me a few times: fire up your Azure functions project, hit F5 to start debugging project builds without errors, Azure Functions host starts… And shuts down right away. This article has a few quick and simple tips on how to extract a bit more information from the Azure Functions host (func.exe), when it’s just silently failing. This means by default you…Continue reading How to extract more information out of your Azure Functions host failing silently?
We were working on getting our Robot Framework tests running during our builds on Azure DevOps. However, using hosted agents, it was quite a struggle to get all of the dependencies on the agent and make sure the tests can access the browser on the build machine. In our case, we were running the tests in Chrome. For this, we needed Robot Framework and some of its dependencies to be…Continue reading How to use the right version of the WebDriver on hosted agents in Azure DevOps?
This post describes how you can easily enable debug/verbose information for your Azure Functions for a lightweight and built-in way to extract just a bit more information out of your Azure Function executions. There’s different methods available for Azure and your local development environment. Problem Azure Functions are awesome. But by default, your tools on gathering information without some additional configuration are not that great. The “monitor” view of the…Continue reading How to enable verbose logging for Azure Functions?
This post describes how you can access your Entity Framework Core model classes and the database context in your Azure Functions. In my example I’m using EF Core 2.1, but the main principle should be the same for later versions as well. Please note, that I use Azure functions runtime v2 (but it should work the same in v3 !) Another easy one, that I was unable to find much…Continue reading How to access Entity Framework Core’s DbContext in an Azure Function?
Welp – another interesting error encountered while deploying Azure Functions to Azure. So, everything runs nicely locally, but when you deploy your well-tested, functional and pretty code to run them in the cloud, you’ll just get these ugly and unfriendly errors. Long story short, “Function compilation error” is what you’re faced with. Example error below: Function compilation error Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Scripting.CompilationErrorException : Script compilation failed. at async Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Script.Description.DotNetFunctionInvoker.CreateFunctionTarget(CancellationToken cancellationToken) at C:\azure-webjobs-sdk-script\src\WebJobs.Script\Description\DotNet\DotNetFunctionInvoker.cs :…Continue reading Sudden “Function compilation error” for an Azure Function
Have you ever run into a situation, where you just wanted to remove the currently standing function definitions from your app service without actually nuking the whole Functions app? I have! App Service configuration is usually easy to manage programmatically or by scripting, so even if you need to redo the deployment, it should be fairly straightforward. But what if you don’t have the setup scripted, and have already configured…Continue reading How to remove Azure Functions without deleting the Functions App?
