Thoughts on Global Azure Bootcamp 2019

I’ve got a collaborative post coming up on the talks themselves on my employer’s blog but as a speaker and tech enthusiast, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the bootcamp as a whole.

Firstly, I’d like to thank Gregor Suttie who organised the Glasgow chapter under the Glasgow Azure User Group banner.

It’s an impressive feat getting so many speakers on so many topics around the world. Each city is going to be limited in the talks they can offer, but I was impressed by the distances some of the speakers at the Glasgow event traveled.

I would have liked to have been more of a global feel. I know the challenges of live video, especially interactive, but this is an event that would benefit from some of that (or indeed, more speakers participating the the online bootcamp via pre-recorded YouTube videos). I realize an event like Google I/O or Microsoft Build is different in focus, being company rather than community driven, but it felt like a set of parallel events rather than one, so it also feels as if some of the content is going to be lost, and there were a lot of interesting looking talks in other cities that turned up on the Twitter hashtags.

There’s obviously a lot to cover under the Azure umbrella, so it’s going to be hard to find talks that interest all the audience all the time, and it was hard to know where to pitch the content. I aimed for an overview for beginners which I think was the right CosmosDb pitch for the Glasgow audience, but I was helped by the serendipity of coming after an event sourcing talk so I could stand on the shoulders of that talk for some of my content.

I would maybe have liked to see more “virtual tracks” so that it was easier to track themes within the hashtags, whether it’s general themes like “data” or “serverless” or technology/tool focused like “CosmosDB”, “Azure DevOps” or “Office 365”, to help me connect with the other channels and see what content is must interesting to follow up. Although Twitter was a good basis for it, I think there’s scope to build a conversational overview on top, into which YouTube videos, Twitter content, Github links, blog posts, official documentation and slide content could be fed.

As a speaker, the biggest challenge was keeping my knowledge up to date with all the updates that are happening, and events like this do help, but as I’ve been on a project that’s Docker and SQL focused recently, it’s a lot of work on top of my day job to keep in touch with the latest updates to CosmosDb, especially as a few tickets on the project were picked up and moved to “In Progress” between submitting and delivering my talk, and a new C# SDK was released.

Advertisement

CosmosDb in The Real World : Azure Global Bootcamp 2019 (Glasgow)

Thank you to those who came to my talk today about CosmosDb. I hope you found it useful.

If you’d like to review the slides, you’ll find the presentation online here :

CosmosDb In The Real World – GitPitch

If you have any further questions please ask below and I’ll do my best to answer.

Debugging Asp.Net Core 2 apps in Azure

I’ve been getting under the skin of Asp.Net Core 2 following a failed experiment with Asp.Net Core v1. I certainly found .Net standard and the associated framework support to be very welcome, and unlike my previous project we didn’t need to support GDI or SignalR libraries, so it’s much more in the Core sweet spot.

I’ll talk about the project and the technologies involved in some follow up posts, so if you’ve got any real-world questions on Asp.Net core, React/Redux with Typescript, or CosmosDb in C#. let me know and I’ll try and address them as I get to those technologies.

For now, though, I want to start with the basics. Asp.Net core on Azure works great, mostly, but if something goes wrong in Startup.cs, there’s no Application Insights, a generic 502.5 IIS error – which just means it can’t talk to Kestrel, and no web logs to help you. So before you deploy to Azure, do yourself a favour and add the following to web.config so you’ve got logs to help you.

<system.webServer>
<handlers>
<add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified" />
</handlers>
<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\web.api.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="true" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" />
</system.webServer>

That way, if you do see a 502.5 error on your site, you can jump into Kudu and start reading the logs. They can grow quite quickly, depending on your web app lifecycle settings, so you may benefit from a regular cleanout of your logs folder.

If the logs still aren’t helping, or you don’t understand what you’re seeing, there’s a nice Asp.Net core 2 troubleshooting guide over at MSDN, but not all of it applies to Azure.