Out with the old in with the new(er)

With 2016 drawing to a close and 2017 already in full swing for me, I thought this was a good opportunity to reflect on how 2016 went and what 2017 has in store for me from a technological point of view.

2016

If asked how 2016 was from a professional perspective I’d probably try to sum it up as follows “Technology continued to roll out at an ever increasing pace, not only was new technology appearing faster than ever before, existing technology stacks started iterate and churn under our feet!”

Nearing the end of 2016 was where I finally admitted defeat and realized that I can’t keep up with everything and I while I sure am greedy and to know everything about everything, it was getting to the point that I was becoming a ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’ dare I say a full stack developer! I’d actually like to think I’m master of some, but certainly it was a big effort to stay on top of everything.

What did I get up to?

Azure : I got certified in Azure this was without doubt my most prized professional achievement of 2016, I’ve been using Azure for years and I feel quite confident in acclaiming it to be the best public could in the world today.
I’ve also started work on a state of the art data distribution network using Server-less architecture. I finally got down and dirty with Swagger/API Apps/LogicApps/AzureFunctions.
I got a lot better at networking, Load balancing resiliency, Azure/AWS causes a, devops inner persona to ooze its way to the top.
I listened with baited breath to the Azure Weekly Azure Podcast to see what was new (and always scratched my head when Cale got excited about BlockChains, perhaps next year I’ll look back and kick my self for not being an early adopter, it does seem to be an area that’s heating up).

AWS: I got certified as an AWS Solutions Architect, it was great to get a better understanding of AWS and indeed for a few offerings they I’d choose them over Azure. Got heavily involved in AWS CloudFormation and helped regain some control on AWS madness.

Google Cloud: I spent a few weeks playing with it just to see how it’s coming along, at least now I’m somewhat informed but I’d only consider myself as a beginner (I’d consider GoogleCloud a beginner also , unless they put in a massive investment into the portal and services, they simply can’t compete with Azure and AWS.

Docker: I can create images, start stop then understand volumes, I didn’t get as far as any of the clustering techniques such as swarm but I see huge value in Docker!

AngularJS: Architected and delivered a cutting edge data visualization system based on Angular 1.x, typescript,sccs,gulp. 
Introduced AngularJS in to multiple smaller projects.

Typescript: This is a fantastic language, and now especially with all the bells and whistles in v2.1 (not least async/await for es5 targets). If you are writing any Javascript you need to learn this no one will ever convince me that a dynamically typed language is better than a statically typed language for starters, but with all the new Standards based features now baked in, it’s certainly taking the industry by storm, I can’t see how Babel will continue to fight for its place in the world alongside it.

Ionic2: I wrote another mobile app, I’ve done this in many languages to date, I started out with iPhones and xamarin c#, moved to objectiveC and java, and finally settled back on the Typescript/Angular2 based Ionic2 framework. It’s a pleasure to deal with, and with my other investments in the underlying stack it has become a natural fit.

Java8: Finally spend some time getting up to speed on the new jdk and it’s offerings. While not strictly Java8, I’m including Sprint Bootstrap, Wildfly10 Application server, CDI, JaxRS etc in this section.

Camel: Gained a basic understanding and working knowledge of the Camel EAI framework.

ActiveMQ: I debated about putting this one on here, all queues fulfil the same core requirements to pass messages right? But I did approach ActiveMQ from three different sides camel/c#/java, so that was interesting.

.NET 2017 I’m now informed about what’s coming down the line. Some interesting thing like C#7 (which I will admit I had to read twice before I saw the value in the language changes), better support for the web stacks (although I’d admit with a tear in my eye that I’ve moved to Jetbrains software and am unlikely to come back to VStudio unless it’s an ASP based backend).

Client Products: Not only the development stacks have been changing, products in use by my clients have been moving at a rapid pace also and given they pay the bills I dedicate a fair amount of time to understanding them in depth.

Resource Consumption:
DNR -Listened to nearly every episode of DotNetRocks.
Hanselminutes - Funnily enough I found DotNetRocks as I used to subscribe the Hanselminutes; I say used to, as I’ve finally given up on Hanselminutes it appears to have moved in a different direction in the last year or so, don’t get me wrong, Scott is a great guy one of the best technical speakers in MS if you ask me, I even follow the weekly ASP.net stand-ups which he’s in, it only the podcast that I gave up on in December.

Other recommended podcasts:
Angular In Action
Javascript Jabber
RunAs Radio
Azure Podcast

2017

As you can image it takes a lot of time to get proficient in any of the above stacks I’ve mentioned . I’ve been trying to stay on top of them all and I’ve now reached the point or realization that need to let some go (think of Kate Winslet prying Leonardo DiCaprio’s icy fingers off that board she was on, it’ll be oh so sad). I’m going to narrow down the field, I’ll still keep in touch with them and if I encounter anything I don’t understand then I’ll make it my business to understand it, I simply won’t actively go pursuing them all. I’ve been burnt before with that approach, I learn Sliverlight after all, it wasn’t all bad as I wrote a windows phone app and many WPF apps around the same time, so the experience transferred nicely, it’s just that I’m not writing much WPF these days so I’ll put effort back in that direction only if and when needed.

Q: So the question remains: Where am I going to put my extended effort this year? 
A: Azure first approach. Azure will be the primary topic of my blogs whether the implementation is in C#/JavaScript/Typescript/Java I don’t really care. If the backend is .NET or Java, again I don’t really care but I do intend on blogging on practical usage cases for Azure services, I may even create a video or two!

Happy new year!

Azure vs. AWS Text to Blob with SDKs

This demonstrates what is involved in writing and reading some text to an Azure and an AWS blob.

Use case

What i set out to achieve was to demonstrate how to read and write some text to a blob with the SDKs. Just to make it a little more interesting I decided to use .NET for the reading and Java for the writing.

Obtaining the SDKs

Adding the SDKs was a seamless process, for .NET Nuget was used and for Java Maven was used

 

.Net Java
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Write

Azure

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AWS

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Read

Azure

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AWS

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Conclusions

Both SDK’s were trivial to install and use, the Azure SDK’s suited my use case a little better in that they didn’t need me to deal with files in my Application code (I expect text is not a mainstream use case).

AWS as always relies on the region being specified which I can’t say I like that much.

Azure, Sql User invalid from Azure Website

Problem

I was faced with a problem this morning that took me a good 30 minutes to figure out..

I had created a website and associated SQL database. However I changed said database as part of some development work. The problem was that even though my publish profile was overriding the Release Connection String with my new database it was getting ignored!

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I knew that the connection string I was supplying was correct as I could log in with Visual Studio and SSMS.

Cause:

The reason is that the website had already an connection string (under the Configure tab) and this was taking preference. The reason this is here is that one does not have to store the Azure connection string in the publish profile which is quite nice, same goes for a lot of other Azure features.

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Solution

I removed same and then it works. (Fixing it is also another option but this code is in a private git repository so it’s not a concern for me just now).

Uploading a Blob to Azure container

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In the picture above you see a storage account in Azure, in the storage account we have an ecbfx (European Central Bank FX Rates) container. Now let’s see how to upload some data to this container using a C# console application.

NUGET

Given we are going to work with C# the best option is to use the .NET library, this can be retrieved from NuGet

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Code

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The code above connects to the pre-created container, notice that my container has built in Geo Redundancy (primary storage in Dublin, secondary in the Amsterdam) so after running there will be 6 copies of this blob, 3 in Dublin and 3 in Amsterdam, this is the storage package I’ve chosen.

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View Blob

The easiest way to view the newly uploaded blob is to use the Windows Azure server explorer in Visual Studio, it’s the easiest way of getting the connection string to the storage account also.

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In the next post I’m going to show you how react to someone uploading a Blob with an automatic trigger.