Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Latest Posts

Setting up better logging in Azure Functions

We have been using Azure Functions for years. Being able to easily deploy and run code on both Azure App Services and real serverless has been a killer feature for all of our asynchronous jobs and services. Unfortunately, the logging approach provided as part of the default template is not ideal. In this post, I'll introduce you to the first steps we take in all of our existing and new function apps to improve logging. A quick note about the Azure Functions runtime.

Parsing websites in C# with Html Agility Pack or AngleSharp

While developing the "new" canonical check feature for elmah.io Uptime Monitoring, I had to parse a website from C# and inspect the DOM. I have been using Html Agility Pack in the past so this was an obvious choice. I also looked at what happened in the space and found that AngleSharp is an excellent alternative. In this blog post, I'll showcase both frameworks to help you get started.

Building and deploying AWS email templates with Azure DevOps

This is the third and final post (for now) in the series about developing email templates with MJML and deploying them to AWS. In the previous post, we developed a Gulp script to automatically build HTML from the MJML file and insert it in a template file for AWS. In this post, we will set up an automated build and deployment of the email template using Azure DevOps. A quick recap.

Building MJML email templates with Gulp

This is the second post in the series about building email templates with MJML and deploying them on AWS. In the previous post, we learned about MJML and Handlebars.js for creating cross-browser email templates with dynamic content. In this post, I will show you how you can script the building process of MJML emails and prepare them for upload on AWS. Let's do a quick recap. In the previous post, I created a simple mail template in MJML.

Creating AWS email templates with Handlebars.js and MJML

In the next two posts (maybe more) I'll share how we have developed elmah.io's email templates currently sent out using Amazon Web Services (AWS). This first post will introduce template development using MJML and Handlebars.js. In the next post, I'll explain the process of building them on Azure DevOps and deploying them to AWS.

How to get the client IP in ASP.NET Core even behind a proxy

Part of implementing an error monitoring platform like elmah.io is dealing with the IP addresses of the clients generating errors. In this post, I'll show you parts of how we have implemented this in ASP.NET Core, to make sure that different hosting scenarios still produce the correct IP address. Let's jump right in. ASP.NET Core supports getting the client IP directly on the HttpContext object available throughout various places.

Deploy Access Restricted Azure website from DevOps Pipelines

We have a couple of internal websites hosted on Azure. Websites that require authentication and should only be accessed from our IP. This can easily be configured using Access Restrictions in Azure. But when doing so, you exclude the dynamic IP range for Microsoft-hosted Azure DevOps build agents. In this post, I'll show you how we set up deployment to the Access Restricted websites with a bit of PowerShell magic.

Creating and downloading zip files with ASP.NET Core

For a recent feature, I had to download a batch of files from an internal website written in ASP.NET Core. Zipping the files before downloading them, turned out as a great way of easily implementing multi-file download. .NET offers all of the needed features and in this post, I'll show you how to implement it. To get started, I'll create a new ASP.NET Core website: I'm picking the MVC template, but none of the zip-related code is specific to MVC.

Logging and global error handling in .NET 7 WPF applications

While developing elmah.io support for WPF, I had the chance to look into WPF for the first time in many years. I couldn't stop myself from digging down into all sorts of details about how logging has evolved in WPF since I last wrote a WPF app. In this post, I'll share some of the findings I made in this rediscovering journey.