Imagine that you want to give a fantastic dinner to your loved ones a great New Year's Eve dinner, but you want to keep it a surprise for as long as possible. So you decide to start sending them different SMS messages with a series of clues on different days to maintain the "mystique" of this surprise.

In this article, you will create a console application to send scheduled SMS messages with Twilio that are sent at a specific time/date.

Prerequisites

You will need the following for your development environment:

• a .NET IDE (Visual Studio, VS Code with C# plugin, JetBrains Rider, or any editor of your choice)
• .NET 6 SDK (earlier and newer versions should work too)
• A Twilio account (try out Twilio for free)

You can find the source code of this tutorial in this GitHub repository.

Configure Twilio

Get your …

Configuration management has always been a challenge for developers. It gets especially tricky when it comes to storing sensitive configuration values such as API keys, tokens, certificates, passwords etc. In this article, you will learn how to use HashiCorp Vault with C# .NET to manage your application’s secrets.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following things in this tutorial:

• A free Twilio account
• A Twilio Phone Number with SMS capabilities.
• An OS that supports .NET (Windows/macOS/Linux)
• .NET 6.0 SDK (newer and older versions may work too)
• A code editor or IDE (Recommended: Visual Studio Code with the C# plugin, Visual Studio, or JetBrains Rider)
• Docker Engine (You can install the engine using Docker Desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux), Colima (macOS and Linux), or manually on any OS.)

Problem Statement

Let’s start by implementing a simple application to demonstrate the issue. It’s a simple .NET console application that sends a …

The Twilio helper library for ASP.NET (Twilio.AspNet) is a community-driven open-source project to make integrating Twilio with ASP.NET easier, for both ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET MVC on .NET Framework. The library helps you achieve common use cases and with the release of version 7, we're expanding the library's capabilities and improving existing features.

What's new in Twilio.AspNet v7.0.0

V7.0.0 is a major release of the Twilio.AspNet library because it contains breaking changes.

Here's an overview of the changes:

🎉 NEW FEATURES

• You can now use the ValidateTwilioRequestFilter to validate that HTTP requests originate from Twilio. This adds validation to endpoints including Minimal APIs.
• You can also use the new ValidateTwilioRequestMiddleware to validate Twilio requests for when you can't use the [ValidateRequest] attribute or the ValidateTwilioRequestFilter.
• There are new overloads for the TwiMLResult constructor and …

In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use Visual Studio dev tunnels to make your ASP.NET Core application publicly available and then use your public application to handle the Twilio SMS webhook.

In this blog post, you will learn how to retrieve the tunnel URL from your ASP.NET Core application and use it to automatically update the Twilio SMS Webhook, so you don't have to do this manually whenever the tunnel URL changes.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following things to complete this tutorial:

• Finish the previous tutorial on Visual Studio dev tunnels and Twilio SMS Webhooks
• A Windows machine (there is no information about support for Visual Studio for Mac yet.)
• Visual Studio 17.4 or later, with the ASP.NET and web development workload installed
• In Visual Studio, you need to enable the dev tunnels preview feature

You can find details on how to do these steps …

Technology provides us with countless benefits, and as programmers, we should better ourselves to produce more value all the time. But then again, there are certain seasons in a year when you should just relax and have fun with your skills. In this tutorial, you will use Amazon Polly to create audio files from text, add some optional (ideally spooky) sound effects and play that file to your friends using Twilio Voice and .NET.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following things in this tutorial:

• A free Twilio account
• A Twilio Phone Number
• An OS that supports .NET …

In my previous blog post, I showed how to deploy SQL Server in a Docker container, then connect to it from a .NET Web API application using Entity Framework Core.

In this post, you're going to build on the previous post and learn how to deploy a .NET Web API application in a Docker container and connect it to SQL Server running in a container also.

Prerequisites

You will need the following things in this tutorial:

• A Windows, Linux, or Mac machine
• .NET 6 SDK (or newer)
• A .NET code editor or IDE (e.g. VS Code with the C# plugin, Visual Studio, or JetBrains Rider)
• Docker Engine (you can install the engine using Docker Desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux), Colima (macOS and Linux), or manually on any OS.
• Some experience with ASP.NET Core MVC or Web API and EF is recommended, but not required.

Get Started …

As a Raspberry PI fan, I like to read The MagPi Magazine, which is freely available as PDFs. The problem is I tend to forget to download it manually every month, so I decided to automate the process. If Raspberry Pi is not your thing, you should be able to modify the demo application to work for any periodical publication that offers free downloads.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following things in this tutorial:

• A free Twilio account
• A Twilio Phone Number with SMS/MMS capabilities.
• An OS that supports .NET (Windows/macOS/Linux)
• .NET 6.0 SDK (newer and older versions may work too)
• A code editor or IDE (Recommended: Visual Studio Code with the C# plugin, Visual Studio, or JetBrains Rider …

URLs are used to locate resources on the internet, but URLs can be long making them hard to use. Especially when you have to type the URL manually, even more so when having to do so on a mobile phone. Long URLs are also problematic when you have a limited amount of characters such as within an SMS segment or a Tweet.

A solution to this is to use a URL shortener which will create URLs that are short and sweet. When you open the shortened URL, the URL will forward you to the long destination URL. This makes it easier to manually type the URL and also save precious characters.

In some cases, you need to gather chunks of data from multiple sources and submit the final information package to the server for processing. The work-in-progress (WIP) pattern enables you to gather lots of data over a long period of time before reviewing it and submitting the data collected for processing.

The key component of the WIP pattern is a persistent “work document” that you keep enriching with input over time and finally submit to the server after a review. The work document is not a single entity, and the pattern allows you to manage several work documents simultaneously. For example, you might want to create individual work documents for every customer requesting approval for credit purchases.

A work-in-progress application should support the following operations:

1. Create document: Create a new work document.
2. Read document: Get a single work document.
3. List documents: Get the list of work documents. …

I love learning and writing blogs about .NET and related technologies. One of my favorites over the past 10 years or so has been Entity Framework (EF) and Entity Framework Core (EF Core). I have used it professionally with MS SQL Server, Postgres, and MySQL. But the thing I don’t like is installing these databases on my computer, they are large, they add services that run on startup, and consume lots of resources.

Instead, when I want to write an application using EF and one of those databases, I download a docker image for the database, start up the container, and connect to that instance from my .NET application. When I’m done for the day, I shut down the container, and when I’m done with the application, I delete the container, and image, and my system is clean of the database.

The other great thing about using a database in …