Author: Brenton

  • Azure App Configuration vs App Settings

    For a long time now, App Settings have been the way to configure your app’s settings such as environment variables and connection strings for Azure App Services. In February 2019, Microsoft announced a new service called App Configuration – which, currently in preview – allows you to easily centralise your app settings across multiple resources.…

  • Understanding the Newtonsoft JSON Token

    One of the concepts worth understanding when writing a custom converter for the popular Newtonsoft JSON framework is that of the JsonToken, and the role it plays in helping you understand the JSON being read. The JsonToken documentation for Newtonsoft is relatively sparse – in part because once you understand it, it’s a relatively simple…

  • Which Azure Functions runtime am I using?

    Microsoft currently support two versions of the Azure Functions runtime – version 1 and version 2. This post will look at the main changes between the two versions, and show you how you can check which runtime you’re using. What are the key differences between versions? Version 1 of the runtime was introduced back in…

  • Azure Functions App vs Functions

    A common question asked by newcomers to the world of Azure Functions, is what’s the difference between an Azure functions app vs a function? Are they the same thing? In short, there is a difference. You can think of the functions app as if it refers to a workspace that contains one or more functions.…

  • What’s an Azure Service Principal and Managed Identity?

    In this post, we’ll take a brief look at the difference between an Azure service principal and a managed identity (formerly referred to as a Managed Service Identity or MSI). Dive deeper into Azure AD service principals and managed identities in our new detailed ebook about Azure AD What is a service principal or managed…

  • Using key vault values from variable groups in Azure DevOps pipeline tasks

    Earlier this week we had a post about how you can easily access secrets stored within Azure Key Vault in an Azure DevOps pipeline task, using the Key Vault Task. One other way you can achieve this same functionality is by using a variable group, and in this post we’re going to show you how.…