Protecting angular and ASP.NET core applications – An Overview.

In this and upcoming blog posts, I’ll be talking about integrating Azure Active Directory (AAD) and leveraging open source libraries to protect a system consisting of an angular application and ASP.NET core web apis.

In this post, I just want to give a high level overview of the setup and the technologies involved in securing such as system. As such, I likely gloss over some of the points. In subsequent posts, I’ll cover the specific parts in more details.

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How can you trust a JWT to be authentic?

In this post, I am going to share a few things I have learned about JWT token. Specifically, I am going to go over the structure of a JWT and how you can trust the information in the token to be authentic by validating the signature.

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Hosting a background task in an ASP.NET core application running on IIS.

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.

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Replacing variables in an angular app using Replace Token extension.

In this post, I am going to talk about the Replace Tokens extension, which I have found to be useful for dynamically replace values at build time. For instance, I have used it to display the build number which comes from azure build pipelines in an angular application.

Making the build number readily available to both programmers and non programmers such as business system analysts (BSA) and end users has a couple of benefits. For instance, by displaying the build number in the app, the analysts can quickly tell whether they are testing the expected build after a deployment. As a developer, I often find myself wondering why certain features work on one environment and not the other. Seeing the build number in the app allows me to quickly check whether an issue has to do with the codes or the environment.

Azure Devops provides an easy way to assemble the build number. You can see the options to edit the build number in your build pipelines, under the Options tab.

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Three ways of authenticating a Windows virtual machine against Azure Key Vault.

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.

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Send email with attachments using MailKit for .NET core

This post is another example of setting up and using MailKit for .NET core to send an email with attachments.

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Deploy an ASP.NET core application to IIS on Windows Server 2019.

This is part II of the blog post series in which I share some of ways to build and deploy an ASP.NET core application to IIS running on a Windows VM. In the previous post, I cover how to build and published an ASP.NET core application. The end result is an artifact (a published directory). In this post, I go over how to deploy the artifact to IIS. Along the way, we’ll discuss:

• Enabling IIS
• .NET core runtime and hosting bundle
• IIS website and application configuration
• IIS application pool

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Build and publish an ASP.NET core application using Visual Studio.

This is part I of the blog post series in which I share some of the ways I have learned to build and deploy an ASP.NET core 2 application to IIS running on Windows Server VM.

In this post, we’ll cover just the basics of how to build and publish an ASP.NET core 2 application to a folder using Visual Studio 2017. In the process, we’ll discuss some of the concepts you should be familiar with:

• Release vs Debug build.
• Deployment mode: framework dependent deployment vs self contained deployment.

I assume you have a working ASP.NET core application which you want to deploy. If not, you can just create a new ASP.NET core project, following the documentation.

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Azure queue storage: overview, benefits and usage in .NET/ .NET core application.

I have seen applications which use a database to simulate a queue as part of processing some workflow tasks. Using a database to simulate a messaging queue mean you have to write more boilerplate codes, sql queries for the CRUD operations as well as handle concurrency issues if your applications run on multiple nodes.

Microsoft has made it easy to utilize messaging and queueing in your application with azure queue storage, which is what I talk about in this post.

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Write generic codes with Delegate, Func, Action, and Anonymous Functions in C#

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.

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