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In this post, I want to share an example of using Azure Devops to automatically build and deploy a .NET console application as a windows service to run on a Windows VM.
Continue readingIn this post, I share what I have learned about integrated windows authentication and how to enable it in a web application which consists of an angular front-end and ASP.NET core 3 backend.
Continue readingSometimes ago, I was confused about the role of the Authentication middleware in an ASP.NET core web API that does not authenticate an user. It makes sense to me that you need to use the Authentication middleware if your web application handles the authentication. Specifically, I did not understand why you need to use Authentication middleware if your app is a web API that does not handle authentication. For instance, my web API performs token validation but it does not authenticate a user. Authentication handling is part of the client application which implements OpenID implicit flow to authenticate the user and obtains authorization to access the web API. I believed I only needed the Authorization middleware so that I can annotate the endpoints I want to protect with the [Authorized] attribute. The document states
The
Authentication Middleware and servicesUseAuthenticationmethod adds a single authentication middleware component, which is responsible for automatic authentication and the handling of remote authentication requests.
So if my web API does not handle authentication, why do I still need to call UseAuthentication to add the middleware?
In this post, I go over in more details the steps of retrieving secrets from an azure key vault using client id and secret. This approach is one of the three ways to authenticate a Windows virtual machine against azure key vault. It is suitable if your app runs on a virtual machine which is not an azure resource and so cannot use azure managed identity.
At the high level, the process involves these steps:
You can find the sample project for this post here.
Recently I had to implement the logic to “stamp” a PDF file in my ASP.NET core project. I found the sample codes from this SO post, which works greatly. I’ve extracted the logic into a sample project, which you can find on my github.
In this post, I share how I used the Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.IHostedService interface and System.Thread.Timer class available in ASP.NET core to run a background job at a specified interval. It is straightforward for the most part, and Microsoft provides good documentation on the libraries. One thing that was not clear from the documents was handling overlapping invocations that happens when an invocation starts but the previous one has not finished within the specified interval. If you host your ASP.NET core on IIS, check out my other post to see how you can have your application and thus your background task auto start and run continuously on IIS.
In this post, I share three ways of gaining a Windows virtual machine access to a key vault. The machine can be an azure virtual machine or a non-azure machine such as your personal computer or a on premise server.
This post is another example of setting up and using MailKit for .NET core to send an email with attachments.
In this post, I talk about Delegate, Func, Action, anonymous methods and lambda expressions in C# and how they help with making the codes more concise and generic.
iTextSharp is a popular library for working with PDF files. The unofficial port of the v4.16 is available for .NET core. In this post, I show examples of using the library to programmatically read and fill out a PDF form.