This post is really a note to self and if its useful to anyone else then great! If your wanting to script setting up many Azure Function Apps then you may find this useful. I had a task to create a bunch of function apps in different resource groups and locations to support a project. I have created the below powershell script to help me do this. The script assumed your resource groups are already setup and then [...]
One of the things I love about Azure functions is that they are great for scenarios where you need to use a bit of code to do something useful but its not a real world production component, for example if it's a utility to help the team work better. In this case one of the problems I had was allowing the team to visualise CRM deployments across environments so it was easy to see what was deployed where. [...]
Anyone who follows my blog will know I am a big fan of Specflow for testing components. We usually use SpecFlow to compliment normal unit testing with some automated integration tests which combine the idea of "Does the component behave like we expect it to" with the opportunity to have some tested documentation describing the component behaviour. Ive used Specflow for years when testing Web API and WCF Services and I was keen to use Specflow when coding [...]
Having worked a lot with Dynamics CRM/365 over the last few years I thought it would be interesting to discuss a common use case and some of the architecture patterns you may consider to implement the solution. Lets imagine a scenario where the business requirement is as follows: The user will be updating a customers record in Dynamics 365 When the user saves the change we need the change to be synchronised with the billing system Now at [...]
In the current feature set available on Azure one of the most common patterns for implementing an API is to use a combination of Azure Functions to act as the back end of the API where the bulk of the work is done and then to use Azure API Management (APIM) in front of the function as an API proxy to add additional security, management and operational features to make your API better and improve the usability without [...]
When Logic Apps was first announced at the Integrate summit in Seattle a few years ago one of my first comments was that I felt that this could be an integration game changer for small business in due course. The reason I said this was if you look across the vendor estate for integration products you have 2 main areas. The first is the traditional integration broker and ESB type products such as BizTalk, Oracle Fusion, Websphere and [...]
Every now and then as an architect you would get a request to be able to expose a mapping service for another application to consume and the requirement was preferred if the map was exposed over HTTP so it could be called in real time without the message box over head from executing the map internally to BizTalk. There were a number of solutions which evolved to do this, even the ESB toolkit offered some of these kind [...]
Recently I had a requirement to extend one of our BizTalk solutions, this solution was around user synchronisation. We have 2 interfaces for user synchronisation, one supporting applications which require a batch interface and one which supports messaging. In this case the requirement was to send a daily batch file of all users to a partner so they could setup access control for our users to their system. This is quite a common scenario when you use a [...]