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
• Cognitive Services – Speech Services API Key
• Twilio ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We can use the Twilio Nuget package to write applications that work with the Twilio SMS API, but what if we want to experiment with the API in our IDE? If that IDE happens to be JetBrains Rider, there is an easy way to do this.

Rider is a cross-platform .NET IDE that builds on technology from ReSharper and IntelliJ IDEA. This provides the best of two worlds: excellent .NET code inspections, navigation and refactorings, plus the front-end features from a mature IDE with a vibrant ecosystem. Or in other words: if we want to test a Twilio SMS API call from within our IDE, we can use the built-in REST client for that.

After starting Rider and creating or opening a solution, open the REST client from Tools | Test RESTful Web Service. This will open a new tool window where we can craft HTTP requests.

This tool window allows ...

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 ...

I have been a Magic: The Gathering player for many years now and during my travels I always enjoy partaking in local drafts.

Most Magic stores require the player to be a member in order to let them use their wifi. Because I usually only ever go to stores I don’t have a membership, I always have to rely on my flakey phone’s data to buy or trade cards when I don’t know their price.

I wish there was a way I could get card prices without having to rely on my phone’s internet. Let’s build an app to do just that using Twilio and .NET CORE.

You can download the source code here if you don’t want to go through all the steps. Or just try it out by texting a card name to:

UK: +44 1543 MAGIC5 ( +44 1543 624425)
US: +1 ...

Bundling up your application into a Docker container has many benefits including making deployments really easy without being bound to a particular cloud host. In this post we will containerize a .NET Core application and deploy it using Docker.

Setup

Before we can get started we need a couple of dependencies installed. Make sure you have the latest .NET Core SDK installed. You can download the SDK for your operating system on the project page.

In order to be able to run the Docker containers locally we also need to install Docker. You can find the instructions for your respective operating system on the Docker website.

If you are like me using Visual Studio Code as a code editor, you should also check out the Docker extension.

Creating a .NET Core project

If you already have an existing .NET Core project you are more than welcome to use it. Otherwise ...