The art of simplicity

While everyone is focusing all the announcements at Build 2025, I'm still processing some of the older recently announced features. A feature that I am happy that is finally available in preview is the Terraform export functionality in the Azure Portal. A similar feature already exists for some time for ARM and Bicep but now we can finally export to Terraform configuration files as well. Let’s give it a try… A short walkthrough Go to the Azure portal and browse to a specific resource. From there go to the Automation section and click on Export template . Click on the Terraform tab. The first time I did this I got the error below:   The reason is that you first need to register the Microsoft.AzureTerraform resource provider at the subscription level. Go to your Subscription in Azure. There open the list of Resource Providers .   Search for Microsoft.AzureTerraform resource provider and click on Register .   It can take some ...

For a pet project I'm working on, I created a new Angular application using Angular 19. I used the same Github Actions setup I was using for my other projects. However, this time, the build failed with the following error message: Failed to find a default file in the app artifacts folder (dist/treasurehunt). Valid default files: index.html,Index.html. If your application contains purely static content, please verify that the variable 'app_location' in your workflow file points to the root of your application. If your application requires build steps, please validate that a default file exists in the build output directory. Here is the GitHub Actions file that was used: Important to notice here are the following settings: app_location: This is the location where the Azure Static Web App build task looks for the source code output_location: This is the location where the Azure Static Web App looks for the final application. This should match with your ...

Love is in the air, and like many couples, my girlfriend and I have our Valentine's Day traditions. Hers involves cuddling up to watch a romantic movie, while I secretly wish we were watching Bruce Willis jump off a building. This year, I decided to bridge this divide with a creative solution: I built an AI-powered app that can transform any movie into a romantic masterpiece. The Valentine's Day Dilemma We've all been there. It's February 14th, and you're staring at a choice between "The Notebook" and literally anything else. While I appreciate a good love story, my heart belongs to action sequences, plot twists, and the occasional explosion. But how do you convince your romantic partner that "Die Hard" is actually a touching love story about a man trying to reunite with his wife on Christmas Eve? Enter the Romantic Movie Night Generator That's where my new web application comes in. It uses Azure OpenAI to analyze any movie poster and...

Azure has a lot to offer if you want start building AI enabled solutions. But where do you start? There is just so much to learn and explore that it is easy to get lost in all the services, documentation and information out there. That's where the Book of AI comes in. This comprehensive guide is designed to help you navigate the world of AI services in Azure, providing you with the resources, tutorials, and sample code you need to build innovative solutions using Azure AI services. Why use the Book of AI? The website itself gives the following arguments: I can only agree with that. Use the book of AI to try out not only the different Azure AI services but also the different SDK’s and client libraries. Not a C# developer?  No problem! All examples are available in multiple programming languages.   Eat your own AI But for me the greatest feature of the Book of AI is not the content itself but the way it has been created. Instead of manually writing the complete webs...

Everyone who works in software development knows this: naming things is hard. And when you need to create a lot of resources in Azure, naming things there can even be harder. If you recognize this struggle, I have some good news for you. With the help of the Azure Naming Tool, applying a good and consistent naming strategy becomes a lot easier. Why naming conventions matter Consistency and Clarity : Consistent naming conventions provide clarity, making it easier for team members to understand the purpose and function of each resource. This reduces confusion and enhances productivity. Simplified Management : A structured naming convention simplifies resource management by grouping related resources together and enabling straightforward identification. This is particularly useful in large-scale environments where numerous resources are deployed. Enhanced Security and Compliance : Proper naming conventions can help ensure compliance with security policies and regulatory requi...

Hello everyone, in case you missed the announcement , today a new deep dive series started about how to combine Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search to build a powerful RAG solution.   This 10 parts series consists of the following parts: The RAG solution for Azure Date: 13 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Customizing our RAG solution Date: 15 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Optimal retrieval with Azure AI Search Date: 20 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Multimedia data ingestion Date: 22 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT User login and data access control Date: 27 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Storing chat history Date: 29 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Adding speech input and output Date: 3 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Private deployment Date: 5 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Evaluating RAG answer quality Date: 10 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM...

Hello everyone, I hope that when you are reading this post, you are doing it live from VISUG XL 2024 where I'm giving a presentation about Azure Static Web Apps. During this presentation I show(ed) a lot of the great features that Azure Static Web Apps has to offer. In case you have missed the presentation or you want to get more details, I can recommend to check out the full blog series that I created about Azure Static Web Apps: Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XII...

Last week we had a production issue at one of my customers where a server went offline due to high memory usage. So far the bad news. The good news is that we had Azure Application Insights monitoring in place, so we could easily validate that the high memory usage  was causing the issue as our Application Insight logs showed a long list of OutOfMemoryException s. However as a separate Application Insights instance was used per application, we couldn’t easily pinpoint which application was the main culprit. Remark: Unfortunately it isn’t  possible to show multiple resources on the Metrics tab, so that is not an option(you can upvote the feature if you like it): I could go through every Application Insights resource one by one, but that wouldn’t be very efficient. Therefore I decided to turn to KQL and write a query on top of the Log Analytics workspace where all the data was consolidated. Here is the query I used in the end: And here is how the result looked like wh...

I talked briefly about Azure Charts before as it is a great way to see how the Microsoft Azure platform is evolving. The last 2 weeks I got a lot of deprecation warnings in my mailbox. This brought me back to the Azure Charts website as there is a specific Azure Deprecations Board showing a timeline of coming up service capabilities deprecations. One to bookmark! More information Azure Charts–Help! Azure is evolving too fast… (bartwullems.blogspot.com)

If you are part of the .NET community, you certainly have heard about .NET Aspire. It is a new framework/tool/set of patterns from Microsoft that allows you to build observable, cloud ready distributed applications. It’s main goal is to make it easier to build cloud-native applications on top of .NET. Now if you didn’t had the time yet to take a look at .NET Aspire and want to learn what all the fuzz is about, I have some good news for you. On July 23, Microsoft will host the .NET Aspire Developers Day. This livestream event will be a full day of sessions with one common goal: To show you how easy it is to harness the power of .NET Aspire, why it’s essential for modern development, and how you can leverage a vibrant community for support and innovation. If you like to join, subscribe here for the event. Hope to see you all(virtually) there! In preparation of the event, you can watch the recording of the Let’s Learn .NET Aspire beginner series: More information .NET A...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII – Data API Builder Part XVIII -  Deploy using Bicep Part XIX – Introducing the SWA CLI Part XX(this post) – SWA CLI behind the s...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII – Data API Builder Part XVIII -  Deploy using Bicep Part XIX(this post) – Introducing the SWA CLI Today I want to introduce you a...

One of the cool features that Bicep has to offer is the 'what-if' operation. This allows you to preview the changes that will happen when applying your bicep template. Let’s see this operation in action: Open a command prompt Let’s first check if we have a version of the Azure CLI installed that supports the ‘what-if’ operation: az version The output should look like this: {   "azure-cli": "2.54.0",   "azure-cli-core": "2.54.0",   "azure-cli-telemetry": "1.1.0",   "extensions": {     "connectedk8s": "1.2.0",     "customlocation": "0.1.3",     "k8s-configuration": "1.1.1",      "k8s-extension": "1.0.4"   } } This should return at least CLI version 2.14.0. If not first install the latest version of the Azure CLI. Now we can run the command that w...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII – Data API Builder Part XVIII(this post) -  Deploy using Bicep So far I’ve deployed our Azure Static Web App using Github Actions. Bu...

As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts. Part I - Using the VS Code Extension Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator Part III  – Deploying to multiple environments Part IV – Password protect your environments Part V – Traffic splitting Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json Part VIII – API Configuration Part IX – Injecting snippets Part X – Custom authentication Part XI – Authorization Part XII -  Assign roles through an Azure function Part XIII -  API integration Part XIV – Bring your own API Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API Part XVI – Distributed Functions Part XVII(this post) – Data API Builder So far I have shown you 2 different possibilities to integrate an API inside your Azure Static Web App: You...