As developers, we’ve all done this at least once. We’ve spent time building a cool project that uses a third party API, and then checked it into Github only to realize our API password is there in plain text for all to see. Do a search in Github to see how frequently this still happens.

When I’m writing code for the first time I hard code those values in my code to get things working and then go to commit it to source control. That’s about the time I remember saving passwords into source control is one of the seven Deadly Sins of Security.

If you’re coding in .NET, the Secret Manager makes it easy to remove these sensitive details before checking your code in. It saves those passwords in your environment variables on your machine.

Let’s say you find yourself building an ...

We share a lot in common with Bruce Wayne. By day, Bruce Wayne is a dashing billionaire running his family’s company. At night, he dons the cape and cowl to become Batman, fighting crime and driving fear into the hearts of his enemies. Think about it… Wearing the cape and cowl protects Bruce Wayne’s identity. You are probably thinking – how does this relate to me?

When you connect a device to the internet, it shares identifiable information with each of sites or services it connects to. However, when your device connects to a proxy server before reaching the internet, the proxy server protects your identity and exchanges completely different information about your connection, making you untraceable. It protects your identity just as Batman’s cape and cowl does for Bruce Wayne.

As a developer, I wonder – what happens when my code needs to run through a proxy server ...

Ahh the holidays are here. Christmas time makes me think of classic songs like Happy Holidays, Silver Bells, or It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could crowdsource the music selection at holiday gatherings? This sounds like the perfect candidate for a serverless application powered by Twilio & Spotify. In this post, we will walk through creating an Azure Function to respond to text message requests.

Creating our Azure Functions project in Visual Studio

This project’s ingredients include:

• Visual Studio 2017 Community (at least version 15.5)
  • During setup, install the “Azure development” workload
  • If you’re using Windows, grab Azure Functions and Web Job Tools. This blog was written with version 15.0.31201.0, meaning there may be updates after this blog is published
  • If you’re using a Mac, try grabbing Azure Functions and Web Job Tools ...

What are We Doing

I’ve been a huge .NET fan since the days of .NET Framework 1.1. A number of years and upgrades later, Microsoft turned things up by introducing .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to write and run code from wherever we want without sacrificing productivity, security, or performance. If you’re asking the question, “Well, what does .NET Core do for me?”, then check this out. In a previous blog post, we built an API that shares photos via MMS backed by Dropbox cloud storage using C# and the .NET Framework 4.5. Let’s convert that API from targeting the .NET Framework to .NET Core.

How are We Doing This

To do this, we need to

1. Install .NET Core (and any prerequisites), Visual Studio Code, and the C# Extension
2. Create a new project using the .NET Core command line interface (CLI)
3. Copy ...

Births are Spectacular but Sharing births is difficult

On Jan 24th, 2017 my wife and I added a baby boy to our family. When he arrived, we felt overwhelming joy from bringing a new baby into the world, and were anxious to share this with our friends and family who were about three thousand miles away. Then came the challenge – how should we share this new experience with them?

This is the part where the question “ever heard of Facebook or Instagram?” comes up but that didn’t quite fit my need. See we already have a two year old daughter who didn’t stop needing us when her brother was born. Combining that with the significant drop in sleep meant less energy and desire to do much else. I wanted a solution that could automate this for me with as little intervention as possible. With this in mind ...

Is It Christmas Yet?

For many families the Christmas holiday is a festive time when loved ones gather to enjoy good company and create lasting memories. There are so many things that make Christmas special to me. One thing I always come back to is the food.

I vividly remember getting off of the small old elevator on approach to my grandmother’s door while holiday music blared from the far side of the apartment.  As the door opened the sweet smell of cinnamon and brown sugar coating the candied yams welcomed me in. A few steps into the narrow hallway unveiled the savory odor of a roasted ham covered in cloves, roasted pineapple and maraschino cherries. As I approached the kitchen, I would see a decadent display of options: baked macaroni and cheese that made any other mac ‘n’ cheese taste like something out of a box, smoky collards ...