Azure

Azure Back to School 2022 - Saving Customer Relationships with Azure Cognitive Services

For those of you who missed it yesterday, you can catch one of my two Azure Back to School sessions below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUL7Iuac3bI&ab_channel=BarretCodes

Sunday, September 4, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Using Application Insights For Better Application Logging

As you gain more experience as a developer, you soon realize the importance of good logging for your applications. When an app is small, you can get away with console logging, print statements, etc. But once your app reaches any real size or functionality, especially as you reach your MVP state, it’s time to have some real logging. For that, we can turn to Application Insights. Application Insights is an Azure cloud-hosted logging platform that you can use to keep track of the performance and errors in your live web apps. As the Microsoft docs put it, you can use App Insights to “automatically detect performance anomalies, diagnose issues, see what users actually do with your apps, and help improve app performance and usability”.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022 | 8 minutes Read

Azure Hybrid Connections To Local IIS Server Not Connecting

I found myself needing to create an Azure Hybrid connection from a web application hosted on Azure to a WebAPI application hosting on a server inside a company network. I kept running into one issue that was preventing me from successfully creating my connection. If you find, like me, that no matter what you try, your Hybrid connection just keeps telling you “Not Connected”, there’s one thing you should check in your installed Windows Features list.

Saturday, January 25, 2020 | 1 minute Read

Tagging Images with Flow and Azure Vision API - Part I

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash This time, in our continuing adventures with Microsoft Flow and the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, we’re using the Vision API to tag image files. The flow will pass the Vision API image files from OneDrive and update the image files with the list of auto-generated meta tags the service returns to us.

Monday, August 5, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-OCR

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels Last time we looked at generating thumbnail images via the Vision Service. This time we’re going to look at using the service to get text out of a photograph of a document utilizing the the Vision Service’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. Button, Button We’re going to use a Flow button trigger from the Flow phone app to start this flow. In Microsoft Flow, select New -> Instant - From blank. Give it a name and select “From Microsoft Flow”.

Thursday, August 1, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-Thumbnails

In the past, I’ve played around with some pieces of Azure Cognitive Services surrounding text recognition. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to take a look at some things you can do with the Vision Service and ways we can integrate that with Flow. For this first post, we’re going to use the Vision service to create a thumbnail of our image. There are any number of reasons that you might want to generate thumbnail images for a file. One example would be a company that is putting together an online product catalog or online store. For most situations like this, every product will need one or more full size images and a thumbnail to match each one. For example, when you look at a product on Amazon, there will be a series of thumbnail images along the left side of the product page. Hovering over or clicking on an image will display the full size version.

Monday, July 29, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read

C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read

Deploy To A Private NuGet Feed From VSTS

If you work with multiple related projects that exist in separate solutions, one of the more useful features of Visual Studio Team Services is the ability to easily implement private NuGet feeds. This service lets you keep development of various pieces more separate and yet still make it easy to integrate your private libraries into your other applications. Create Your Feed The first step is to create your private feed. Go in to VSTS and open the project that you want put into a feed. Under the “Build and Release” menu item, you should see a secondary menu item called “Packages”. If you don’t see this entry, you will need to install the Package Management Extension from the VSTS Marketplace into your VSTS account. It’s free if you have fewer than 5 users in your VSTS account.

Saturday, November 18, 2017 | 5 minutes Read

Running a Regularly Scheduled Task with Azure Functions

One of the more recent features of cloud computing is what’s called “serverless computing”. There are a number of different ways in which it is implemented, but for the most part it’s just a way to set up a code function to be able to run without needing to create an entire application and all it’s resources. One of my favorite ways to utilize this feature in Azure apps is to use the functions to kick off nightly maintenance jobs. By using an external function to kick off the job, I am able to keep my Azure web apps set to not be “always on”. This helps keep my costs down, but still lets me kick off regularly scheduled tasks easily. And Azure functions can be written in any of several languages, including JavaScript and C#.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 7 minutes Read

VSTS Deployment with Azure App Service Deployment Slots

Utilizing Azure Application Deployment Slots with the Visual Studio Team Services build and deployment system is quite simple. Set Up Deployment Slots The first step is to create your deployment slots for your application. You do this in your Azure Portal. Open the dashboard to your App Service application’s options. About halfway down the menu options that appear for your app you will see “Deployment slots”. Select this option. Click “Add Slot” and give your deployment slot a name. It also asks you to select whether or not to copy the existing configuration options from an existing slot. This will depend on your preferred deployment process. Some people let their deployment instance use all the same configuration options. I usually use the existing database connections, if any, but will alter any message queues, blob storage, table storage, and anything else that can trigger functionality on the back end, I point these to their respective testing versions so I don’t mess with production data unexpectedly. This is especially true for message queues, I feel. I want to be able to control the testing of the staging slot and not have it kick off unexpectedly if some production message gets through.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 6 minutes Read

Deploying Service Fabric App with VSTS

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) makes it incredibly easy to deploy Azure Service Fabric applications to your Service Fabric clusters as part of a continuous integration process. There’s just a few easy steps to get it set up and running. Setup Your Service Endpoint VSTS-Service Fabric-Service Endpoint VSTS Endpoint Connection Start with setting up your service endpoint. This will connect your VSTS instance to your Azure Service Fabric. In order to make the connection, you’ll need to use the same security you use to connect to your cluster endpoint. This is usually either certificate based or using Azure Active Directory credentials.

Saturday, November 4, 2017 | 4 minutes Read