Today we’ve got a roundup of a great batch of our articles written about .NET and Azure technologies. From tools like ASP.NET Core to Azure Functions, we’ve got you covered with some of the hottest, newest, and most improved technologies that Microsoft has been putting out lately. The best part? Nearly all of these tools are free to use, completely open sourced on GitHub, and are super easy to learn.
So without further introduction, let’s dive in to see where your next learning exercise will be.
Further Reading: Many of these technologies and experiences are augmented with tools like Visual Studio 2019. If you’re lost with Visual Studio, check out our guide. And if you’re looking for awesome tools beyond Microsoft and Visual Studio, we maintain a big list of the best tools to get you started.
ASP.NET gRPC
With gRPC, you’re given tools that allow you to make remote procedure calls between clients and servers or between servers in the case of microservice to microservice communication. If you’ve ever built traditional HTTP APIs like SOAP (XML) or REST (JSON/XML) services, then you’re already familiar with many of the concepts underlying the use cases for gRPC.
Maybe you’re building out a service that lets users manage their contacts and addresses. Or maybe your business has microservices to facilitate document generation and submission of those documents to third parties. The chances are high that these services expose an interface by which consumers can interact. That interface can be exposed in many ways, one of which is through the gRPC framework.
.NET Core Worker Services
Starting with .NET Core SDK 3.0+, a new template has been introduced. It’s named, for better or worse, “.NET Core Worker Service.” This template gives you the ability to create cross-platform background services such as long-running Windows Services or daemons hosted in Linux using something like systemd. Since these services are basically console applications, you could also host a console application in a Worker Service container to be hosted as a microservice.
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines is Microsoft’s approach to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). In the most basic terms, you can create step-by-step processes (pipelines) that will pull down your code, build it, test it, and deploy it. It’s all hosted in Azure on virtual machines that you can select. You can customize the pipelines to fit whatever scenarios you have for you, your organization, and your products. Don’t need to deploy anything? No problem, just don’t add any deployment steps. Continuous building/testing is a step above most.
Durable Azure Functions
This is the second part (see the first part) to our two-part introduction to Azure Functions. In this part, we focus more on Durable Azure Functions to build some resiliency into our workflows. Check out this video in our series about Durable Azure Functions. This was built with Visual Studio 2019. You can find the source on GitHub. Check out our guides to using Git or GitHub!
Azure Functions
We’ve started experimenting with Azure Functions as lightweight, scalable command processors for Twitch chat bots. The documentation can be a little difficult to understand at times, so we’ve compiled this brief introduction based on what we’ve learned so far. Check out this video in our series about Azure Functions. This was built with Visual Studio 2019. You can find the source on GitHub. Check out our guides to using Git or GitHub!
