Ahoy and yo-ho-ho! In celebration o' International Talk Like A Pirate Day, let's build a SMS Pirate Speak translator with Azure Functions, the Fun Translations API and, of course, Twilio.

What you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• An SMS enabled Twilio number (find one here)
• An Azure account (sign up for a free Azure account here)
• Optional: pieces o' eight!

Azure Functions allow you to write code without having to worry about infrastructure or servers, so they are perfect for setting up a simple webhook for an incoming SMS or call from Twilio.

Create an Azure Function

From the Azure portal, click the Create a resource button, found at the top of the menu on the left.  Search for a Serverless Function App and then click on the matching result.

Give your app a name, I called mine twilio-sms-translator, create or reuse ...

Validating user input is important to the security and proper operation of any software application. This is particularly true of data like phone numbers, which are typically private data used to deliver both application functionality, such as messaging, and security features like 2-factor authentication.

Application development frameworks, including the .NET Framework and .NET Core provide data validation capabilities to make it easier to handle standard data types more robustly. While the .NET frameworks provide for validating phone numbers, the capabilities are limited, particularly with respect to internationalization (“i18n”).

Fortunately, there is a open source library, libphonenumber-csharp, that provides extensive resources for validating and manipulating phone numbers of all types. It’s derived from an open source library created by Google. This post shows how you can implement libphonenumber-csharp in your .NET projects and easily leverage this powerful functionality.

.NET Data Validation

A common design pattern in software built with C ...

We've already shown you how to add SMS messages to your application but now, with the new Twilio API for WhatsApp, you can send a WhatsApp message in much the same way.

And quickly.

Here's a thirty-second video showing you just how quickly.

And just to make this super easy to get started, below is all the code and a link to the completed project on GitHub.

What you'll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• The .NET Core 2.1 SDK and runtime
• The WhatsApp Sandbox Channel installed in your account (go through this process to activate the sandbox)

After you have created your new .NET Console application, add the Twilio NuGet package to the solution.  If you are unsure how to do this, check out this post.

Open the Program.cs file and add in the Twilio using statement.  Initialise the Twilio REST ...

SpaceX is on pace to launch nearly 30 rockets to space in 2018.  As a space nerd, I really love watching launches and thankfully SpaceX broadcasts launch streams online.  As frequent as launches are I forget when the next launch is so I can tune in.  Thankfully SpaceX has a great API which includes an endpoint that tells you when the next launch is.  In this post I'll show you how you can build a system using that API, Azure Logic Apps and Twilio SMS to send yourself a daily text message telling you if it's a launch day.

You can build this using a free Azure account and a trial Twilio Account.

Log into your Azure account and create a new Logic App Service.

Once you have the Logic App Service created we can begin to define the workflow we want to run.  Logic App workflows are made up ...

Setting up a .NET application takes time and sometimes you just want to write a quick bit of code that sends you a Chuck Norris joke via the Twilio API for WhatsApp! So that’s what we’re going to do with the help of Azure Functions.

What you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• An Azure account (sign up for a free Azure account here)
• The WhatsApp Sandbox Channel installed in your account (go through this process to activate the sandbox)

Azure Functions allow you to write code without having to worry about infrastructure or servers, so they are perfect for setting up a simple webhook for an incoming SMS or call from Twilio.

Create an Azure Function

From the Azure portal, click the Create a resource button, found at the top of the menu on the left.  Search for a Serverless ...

Imagine you are driving along in your car and your phone beeps, letting you know that a text message has come in.  We all know it’s beyond dangerous to read a message whilst driving, it’s a pet hate of mine when I see people doing it, so why not get your text message phoned through to you? Hands-free, of course!

This post will show you how to create talking texts using Twilio, .NET Core, Cognitive Services and Azure Storage.

We will build an application that will convert incoming SMS into speech using the Speech Service, currently in preview, on Microsoft Cognitive Services.  We will then use Twilio to call your mobile and play the speech recording.

Let’s get started.

What you will need

• .NET Core 2.1 SDK (version 2.1.300 or greater)
• Azure Storage Account with a blob - set the access policy on your blob ...

In this blog post, we are going to use Blazor to build a simple web page that makes telephone calls straight from your browser with C# and Twilio. What is Blazor you ask? It is a new experimental framework that allows developers to build web applications using HTML, C#, and WebAssembly. With WebAssembly, your browser downloads the web application’s binaries from the server and runs the code locally in a sandboxed environment from your browser. This means you’ll write your client side code with a compiled language like C# and have it run faster and more safely from your browser. You can check out the code on Github. If anything else sounds foreign to you, keep calm and carry on! We’ll take care of you.

LAB TOOLKIT

Now to kick off our post, we should make sure we have some tools to follow along:

• .NET Core 2 ...

Ever had that sinking moment of realisation when you push your secrets to GitHub?  I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want your sensitive configurations shared and I’m not just talking about on GitHub.  Members of a development team may not use the same test databases or connection strings.  Maybe the dev team only has access to the test keys for apps such as Twitter but the live keys are squirrelled away in Azure.

A common way to deal with sensitive data in an app is by using Environment Variables.  With the arrival of .NET Core we now have a tidy way of managing configuration and sensitive data in the form of User Secrets, which can be managed by the Secrets Manager Tool (SMT) from the command line.  User Secrets are stored outside of the project tree in ...

Ever had that sinking moment of realisation when you push your secrets to GitHub?  I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want your sensitive configurations shared and I’m not just talking about on GitHub.  Members of a development team may not use the same test databases or connection strings.  Maybe the dev team only has access to the test keys for apps such as Twitter but the live keys are squirrelled away in Azure.

A common way to deal with sensitive data in an app is by using Environment Variables.  With the arrival of .NET Core we now have a tidy way of managing configuration and sensitive data in the form of User Secrets, which can be managed by the Secrets Manager Tool (SMT) from the command line.  User Secrets are stored outside of the project tree in ...

Did you know that Twilio.org offers credits and discounts for nonprofits and social enterprises? Learn more today.

“It’s the free speech fight of our generation.” Evan Greer, Deputy Director at Fight for the Future, doesn’t mince words about the importance of net neutrality. “We see [the rollback of net neutrality] as something that will determine not only the future of what the internet looks like, but what the future of what our society will look like.”

Battle for the Net

Net neutrality is a deceptively simple concept with broad implications. Essentially, it’s the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat content equally. Without net neutrality, ISPs can treat the internet like T.V., where the voices you hear are those that can afford to pay for access, whether that’s your latest Netflix binge, a startup’s homepage, or independent journalism. “Net neutrality protections are ...