Azure Functions has its own opinionated way of developing applications based on triggers, input bindings and output bindings. Azure supports two Twilio products using output bindings: Twilio Programmable Messaging for sending SMS and Twilio SendGrid for sending emails.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send text messages with C# .NET using Azure Functions and Twilio binding.

Prerequisites

You will need these items to follow along:

• OS that supports .NET (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• .NET 6 SDK
• Azure Functions Core Tools
• A code editor or IDE (Recommended: VS Code with C# plugin, Visual Studio, or JetBrains Rider)
• A free Twilio account (If you register here, you'll receive $10 in Twilio credit when you upgrade to a paid account!)

Get started with Twilio

You will need to set up a couple of things with Twilio before developing the Azure function:

• If you don't already have a Twilio phone number, go and buy a …

Many applications have the need to send emails on a periodic basis. A common example of this is a weekly digest, where the email recaps everything that happened that week. There are many ways you could send recurring emails using .NET. You could use the Task Scheduler on Windows, use crontab on Linux, or even develop your own job scheduling implementation. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to schedule recurring emails using Twilio SendGrid and Quartz.NET.

Prerequisites

You will need the following things to follow along:

• OS that supports .NET (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• .NET 6 SDK (download)
• A code editor or IDE (Recommended: VS Code with C# plugin, Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider)
• A Twilio SendGrid account (signup)

Everything you’ll need to do for this tutorial applies even if you’re using an older version of .NET (Core), however you’ll need to make minor adjustments.

Create your .NET application …

Email has been around for decades, but sending emails at scale is still hard. With Twilio SendGrid, you can send emails without worrying about scalability. You can use the SendGrid APIs and SDKs to start sending emails within minutes. You could also use the SMTP protocol if you already have an existing codebase that relies on SMTP. In this post, you will learn how to send emails using the SendGrid .NET SDK and a .NET 6 console application.

Prerequisites

You will need the following things to follow along:

• OS that supports .NET (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• .NET 6 SDK (download)
• A code editor or IDE (Recommended: VS Code with C# plugin, Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider)
• A Twilio SendGrid account (signup)

Everything you will learn applies even if you’re using an older version of .NET (Core), but you will need to make minor adjustments.

Configuring your SendGrid account to …

If you had visited the Swimberghe home back in 2000, you would find 6 year old me building with K’nex, absolutely not following the instruction book, because I didn’t know how to read it. Instead I was building my own invention: a motorized car with a mop cloth hanging from the back to help my parents mop the floor. I was quite proud being the first inventor of “robot cleaner” (probably not the first) even though I was limited to the tools I had. The car only went in one direction until it hit a wall and would keep driving into the wall until someone turned it, but that didn’t matter to me. “Mom, dad, look at what I made!” I shouted excitedly, lucky to experience that ecstatic feeling of building something and being so proud that you want to share it with everyone.

A few years later, the K’nex …

Have you ever called a company but instead of being connected to a representative, you were told no one was available and the call abruptly ended? Have you ever had to stay on the phone waiting for hours until a customer representative finally is able to take your call?

Unfortunately, those bad user experiences are too common and is why people hate calling businesses, but it doesn't have to be this way. Using Twilio Programmable Voice, you can build a better experience! Even if there's nobody available to take the call right now, you could ask them to leave a message and their phone number so you can give them a callback later on.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is for developers at any experience level. Prior experience with the following technologies is recommended, but not required:

• C#
• .NET
• ASP.NET Core

You’ll need the following development resources to build and run the …

Using Twilio's Super Network, you can quickly buy phone numbers from around the world. You can even specify a specific area code to buy a phone number that is local to a certain state, territory, or region.

With Twilio Voice, you can quickly integrate voice communication into your applications. For the application in this tutorial, you'll use Twilio phone numbers, Twilio Voice, and Twilio Functions to create a proxy phone number!

What do I mean by a proxy phone number? Before explaining that, I will discuss a similar concept. In web development, there's a concept of "reverse proxies". When you send HTTP requests to a reverse proxy, the reverse proxy forwards the traffic to a web server on a private network. This way the web server still serves a website but isn't exposed directly to the internet adding benefits like security, performance enhancements, and much more.

Similarly, …

Twilio generates an Account String Identifier (SID) and an Auth token when you create a Twilio account. This key is for all intents and purposes a master key that can be used to perform any function available in the Twilio API.

Anytime you hand over the Account SID and Auth token to a device or a colleague, you increase the risk of that master key becoming compromised. Luckily Twilio provides capabilities to minimize this risk. This article covers:

• API Credentials
• Subaccounts
• API Keys

In short, this tutorial will help you to stop giving away your Twilio Master Key and start using API Keys.

API Credentials

When you create a new account or subaccount, Twilio generates an Account SID and Auth token for that account. You can find these API credentials on the dashboard page of your account:

These credentials are frequently used to communicate with Twilio via the CLI, …

Mobile phones are ubiquitous and convenient but there are times when it’s more practical to be able to receive and place phone calls from a computer. If you’ve called customer service about the tickets you ordered, or anything else, it’s likely the rep you spoke to took your call with a mouse click.

Using Twilio Voice you can add the ability to make and receive phone calls from your own ASP.NET web applications. Twilio’s helper library for JavaScript makes it easy to integrate client functionality into web front ends built with Blazor WebAssembly, and the Twilio NuGet packages provide you with convenient interfaces to Twilio’s APIs for server-side tasks.

Blazor WebAssembly lets you build your application front end in C# and Razor, so you can focus the client-side JavaScript on functionality that requires JavaScript for implementation.

JavaScript interoperability (JS interop) is a feature of Blazor that makes it easy to …

Blazor is a framework for building interactive client-side user interfaces for web applications using .NET. Using Blazor, .NET developers can build stylish and performant web interfaces using C# and ASP.NET Core instead of JavaScript. [Pause for applause.]

Blazor Server provides support for hosting Razor components on a server in an ASP.NET Core app. At runtime, the Blazor Server app sends UI events from the browser to the server and applies UI updates sent from the server to the rendered component.

Blazor Server is built on SignalR, which is built on websockets. Among things, websockets enable Blazor Server to push changes from the server to the browser at any time. You can build real time UIs when you combine this with a real-time database such as Google Firestore.

Firestore is Google Firebase's real-time database offering on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google provides .NET libraries for interacting with …