Andy Butland

I run a side-project website on Azure PaaS, for a music library business called The Perfect Music Library . For a year or so this has had an SSL certificate provided by Let's Encrypt . The certificates provided for this service expiry relatively quickly, and so in order to keep this updated I've set up and deployed a site extension and web job using the excellent instructions provided by Nik Molnar. Recently though I noticed that the most recent update had failed which meant browser warnings of an outdated certificate were being seen by visitors that attempted to access the site. It turns out the issue was a key that's created as a process of setting up a "service principal" (step 5 of instructions linked above) had expired after a year or so. To diagnose this I opened up the Azure portal, located the web application in question and navigated to the list of web jobs. Within that, right-clicking on the letsencrypt.siteextension.job allows the view of the...

A little while back I put together a very basic ASP.Net Core application and blogged about my first impressions in transitioning from "classic" ASP.Net - can we call it that now?! - here . Just today thought would be a good idea to update it to the latest version, particular the change in the format of the project file from JSON (project.json) to XML (.csproj). With VS.Net 2017 this was very straightforward, but I found one gotcha that may or may not affect others, so thought would record it here. When opening the project - originally created in VS.Net 2015 - in VS.Net 2017 a message comes up saying a one-way update needs to happen. I let that complete and it ran successfully. Unfortunately after that VS.Net froze. Closing and restarting the application a few times didn't seem to help - after a few seconds the IDE became unusable and had to be stopped using Task Manager. The issue seemed to be with a hidden .vs folder that VS.Net creates, containing various de...

I recently had chance to work on a proof of concept using Azure AD B2C, which didn't in the end progress but was worth a write-up in case others are working on similar projects, or of course it's something I need to refer back to in future. Azure AD B2C provides cloud based identity and access management with a consumer focus, supporting social media logins and allowing for controlled access to business to consumer applications. The particular challenge I looked at followed a recognition that a given client may have several applications that require authentication and authorisation services, but each of them will have their own specific detail around these aspects. Azure AD B2C offers a model of user accounts and groups, however this generic structure may not provide sufficient detail and flexibility for all applications that want to use it. The proof of concept worked up then was to provide features to extend Azure AD B2C, by building an API that applications can call ...