58 posts tagged with "azure"

Recently I started experimenting with Azure's CosmosDB and developed few applications using the same. To start with it this blog will help all the Azure/CosmosDB developers out there to easily setup with visual studio code. I will be sharing how to connect to Azure CosmosDB without using the portal in local machine.

To start with it, You should have visual studio code installed on your machine. If not download it from here.

We need to setup an extension with visual studio code as a initial step. Azure CosmosDB extension for visual studio code gives developers set of cool commands to work with CosmosDB. With the help of Azure CosmosDB extension developers can easily do the actions which could be done on the azure portal such as Create,delete,modify databases,Collections,views and documents. Also the hierarchical representation will provide a better way to understand the structure of database.

Step 1:

To start with, you must install the Azure CosmosDB from the market place. So, search for Azure Cosmos DB extension in the market place and click on install

Go to View - > Extensions or press Ctrl + Shift + X

Once the extension is installed, you can find Azure CosmosDB in explore section of visual studio code.

Step 2:

To explore the different types of commands with Azure Cosmos DB, open show all command palate and search for Cosmos. It will list down a different set of commands that you can play with,

Go to View - > Extensions or press Ctrl + Shift + P              

Step 3:

Now the extension is installed successfully. Lets see how to connect to Azure CosmosDB  in local machine. Move back to Azure CosmosDB extension section in the explorer panel. Sign in to Azure account to view the CosmosDB accounts inside the visual studio code alternatively you can select “Attach Database Account”

Select the specific Database Account API, in this case it is DocumentDB and enter the connection string copied from the portal

To get the connection string from the Azure Portal, navigate to the respective CosmosDB  Resource, and from the left side panel Settings –> Keys -> Connection String Copy the Primary Connection String.

Now you can see the database displayed with the account provided in the azure CosmosDB explorer pane.

That’s it Now you can Add, Modify Database, collection, and documents within Visual Studio Code. Play around with all the commands and features of the extension.

Step 4: Installing Azure Cosmos DB Emulator

Azure Cosmos DB Emulator provides a local environment that emulates the Azure CosmosDB service for your development. With the Azure Cosmos DB Emulator, you can develop and test your application locally, without creating an Azure subscription and without internet connection. With the extension we installed already you can connect with Local Emulator as well.

Download Azure CosmosDB emulator:

You can download emulator from Microsoft Download Center.

1. Extract setup and run emulator exe.
2. Once you completed the setup, type Azure Cosmos DB Emulator in Start menu.

Start the local Azure CosmosDB Emulator, and make sure it’s running.

Verify the access by exploring the local emulator on this address.

https://localhost:8081/_explorer/index.html and you should see a screen as follows.

Step 5:

Once you verify your Azure Cosmos DB Emulator is running, you can go back to Visual Studio Code and try to attach the emulator by selecting Connected with Azure Cosmos DB Emulator option

After 1 or 2 minutes, you can find your local Cosmos DB data also mapped in Visual Studio Code.

As a developer I found this extension is very powerful and if you are developing Azure based solution with Visual Studio code, you must start exploring this.

Start building application with cosmosdb today 😊 Cheers!

In this blog i will start with an introduction to .NET Core CLI tools with an example of how to create a web API using the CLI tools provided with .NET Core. At the end we will set up a solution grouping an API project and a test project. Let's dive into the steps,

Step 1 :  Installing the tools

Need to install .NET Core and Visual Studio Code that are supported on Mac, Unix and Windows. You can read more on how it works on multi-platform/framework.

Step 2 :  Creating the solution

Let's open the terminal/Powershell as a administrator to create our solution. Lets create a solution named DotNetCoreDemoApi

  dotnet new sln -o DotNetCoreDemoApi  

The above command will create a new folder and DotNetCoreDemoApi a solution file with the  name DotNetCoreDemoApi sln .

Lets get into that folder.

Step 3: Creating the web API project

Run the following command,

 cd DotNetCoreDemoApi 

Now that the solution is here, we can create our API project. Lets name the web API as DotNetCoreDemoApi. Run the following command to create the project.

dotnet new webapi -o DotNetCoreDemoApi  

That command will create a sub folder named DotNetCoreDemoApi  inside the solution DotNetCoreDemoApi and the ouput is as follows.

The web API folder should contain a few files generated as above  but what we require right now is DotNetCoreDemoApi.csproj. We will add a reference to it in our solution. To do so, run the following command:

 dotnet sln add ./DotNetCoreDemoApi/DotNetCoreDemoApi.csproj

Step 4: Run the Web API After getting a confirmation message as above , lets start the API by running that command:

 dotnet run --project DotNetCoreDemoApi  

After a few seconds, it should display a message  that the API is now running locally as above. You may access it at http://localhost:5000/api/values which is the Values API default endpoint.

That's all , API is ready and it is up and running locally. I will continue setting up the TestProject in the same solution in the upcoming blog. With the DotNet core it is very feasible to get your web api setup and running in 5 minutes.

This is my first blog and Azure and i am inspired to write this one after attending the Microsoft's workshop "App innovation day".There was a cool technology "Windows Workflow Foundation" provided by Microsoft with dot net framework to create workflows to cater business logic in dot net applications. With Azure, The Logic Apps service fulfill the purpose to have business processes or workflows take shape of an app.

It required no coding just simple logic that needs to placed in a right way to have right business flow. It was also meant for the purpose of integrating 3rd party apps like Facebook,YouTube, Twitter and Evernote etc. All we need to have is the dynamic work flow.There are different benefits and different use cases in which we can apply azure logic apps. Let's discuss some of the benefits when using logic apps!

Rapid development

Logic Apps is great for rapid development.With ever growing list of connectors, we can easily create a workflow to monitor invoice, send for approval to a admin, upload to dropbox and send email notification in matter of few seconds.

Solutions with Hybrid cloud

5 years back ,Lot of businesses have invested heavily in on premises solutions and hardware, so it’s not possible to move everything to the cloud. With Logic Apps, it’s easy to have a hybrid cloud during this transition. With its on premises data gateway, you can easily connect your on premises database, file share, BizTalk server to Azure cloud.

It is the new way of Automating business process. You can build long running business process, that orchestrate data and services across all cloud services and not just Azure. It's not only for the developers but for everyone. The best bit you need to write code , you can use Visual editor to build your orchestration.

Lets Dive into Simple Demo Use Case: Filter twitter feeds with specific hashtags and post the specific tweets on the Facebook wall. In this example , i just created a process that repeats every few minutes to pull some data from twitter feed and post it on your Facebook wall. Even though this feature is already supported with Facebook, here its slightly different since it is filtering only the specific keywords which is a custom filtering.

The entire flow i described about is composted of 3 simple steps , that you can build using a Visual UI.

Step 1: Select Logic App click "Create" and give a specific name ,resource 

 Step 2: There are number of workflow templates will be shown as below and select the appropriate one , in this case i will use "when a new tweet is posted"

also authorize with your twitter account from which you want to fetch the feeds

Also configure the conditions by mentioning the filters and the timeline you want to trigger the action.

Step 3: Next step is to post on facebook wall , click "Add step"  

Search for Facebook and authenticate will your Facebook account as follows,

Click post to my timeline

Also you can map the fields that you want to fetch from the feed and post it on the wall as below,

That's it folks, once all fields are mapped you need to save the Logic app with the save button.

With the above 3 steps posting a filtered tweet on Facebook wall is configured and can be scheduled as you need. If the above particular feature needs to be developed without azure means it will need a huge development time and cost, which can be avoided using the Logic app as shown above.

That's the demo. You can explore several steps and several templates provided in the portal without writing a single line of code. I will be writing a separate blog on how to configure custom logic app in the upcoming blog posts. Happy connecting with app logic!