Ones and Zeros

Authentication and Authorization  in Azure     OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and Microsoft Entra ID work together to provide modern identity, authentication, and authorization services across the web. OAuth 2.0 handles authorization (what a user can access), OpenID Connect adds authentication (who the user is, for app access), and MS Entra ID acts as the Identity Provider (IdP) that issues the secure tokens for both. MS Entra Id was formerly Azure Active Directory.      Register your app in the MS Entra admin center. This generates a unique Client Id, registers your Redirect URIs, and defines what API permissions (scopes) your app needs.      Steps: 1) Request, 2) Redirection, 3) Authentication, 4) ID or Access Token Issued.      The caller is the one that must invoke MS Auth Library’s (MSAL) AcquireTokenSilent method. The caller handles token acquisition errors raising UiRequiredAuthError (and pops up login screen), while th...

Infrastructure as Code in Azure Infrastructure as Code       Usually in the Windows world, IaC was done via ARM templates, Azure Bicep, or Terraform. Now look at .NET Aspire's way:     ARM        So the old way was Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates written in JSON.      Bicep          Azure Bicep which is human-friendly abstraction layer with type safety and Intellisense on top of ARM templates.        .NET Aspire         .NET Aspire changes the entire paradigm of IaC by making it Application-Driven  Infrastructure. Instead of writing YAML or Bicep templates by hand in a separate  folder, you define your app's dependencies directly in C# code, and .NET Aspire  automatically creates the IaC and deployment artifacts for you. Steps: 1) you write an AppHost project. 2) .NET Aspire reads the AppHost and creates a manifest.json file. 3) Azure Develop...

GitHub Actions     Obviously you can use Azure Dev Ops or GitHub Actions.  I just wanted to post about why I was excited about the trend to GitHub Actions.  .NET Aspire  GitHub Action  Pipeline Workflow 1. Shift-Left Continuous Integration (CI)  Trigger Orchestration : A git push to your main branch initiates an event-driven webhook that awakens your self-hosted Windows worker node .  Stateless Build Matrix : The workflow leverages a clean runner workspace environment to execute dotnet build and dotnet test . This ensures Shift-Left security and validation , catching structural anomalies and regression bugs before a single line of compiled code leaves the local machine.  Hermetic Dependency Caching : The pipeline utilizes aggressive NuGet package caching actions on the local NTFS filesystem to maximize throughput, bypass network bottlenecks, and compress build execution time. 2. Containerization and Artifact Store Dockerized Microservices ...