Securing your static HTML website without backend coding

If you want to secure your static HTML website with some kind of credentials, you need to be able to execute code on the server-side of your website.

Microsoft offers this great Azure storage feature of hosting a static HTML website. This is a real low-cost solution for public-facing websites.

But if you need up to date security, eg. with a name/password, we need to check out Azure WebApps. This is just a selection of possible pricing tiers:

I recommend at least the Basic tier if you are building a commercial site. The F1 and D1 run on a shared infrastructure and are great for makers.

Do not forget to enable SSL, we are going to pass on secrets between browser and server:

So now we have the Web app set up, create a DevOps environment which we will use to deploy our website to build. Just follow my previous blog and you are good to go.

Did I mention already you do not have to program for this trick? Just follow this tutorial, drop some extra files and use your own secret password.

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Tracking the location of your IoT Central devices

Recently IoT Central added location tracking.

In the past, it was already possible to add a location to your IoT Central devices. And these locations were shown on a map. But these locations were fixed, part of the device template properties. So it was only present in the metadata.

But now we can pass a location in the telemetry which is produced by your device.

Let’s see how it’s done and how the location is integrated into the various IoT Central dashboards.

Use FTPS to deploy your WebApp using Azure DevOps

It’s obvious, there is a strong relationship between Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps.

And that is OK.

One of the most used features by my colleagues is the deployment of WebApps using Azure DevOps continuous integration.

The build pipeline has specific tasks to support this great feature.

You can also see it in the Azure portal when checking out the deployment center of a WebApp:

There is one thing you need to know though: you need to have access to the Azure portal to get access to a WebApp.

So I checked out FTP. Yes, this is a simple protocol to move files from ‘A’ to ‘B’.

Secure FTP is supported too by an Azure WebApp:

And it already provides a ‘generic’ name and password.

Let’s check out how this works in Azure DevOps.

C# Unity dependency injection primer

Recently, I got a question on how to start Dependency injection in C#. For those already familiar with DI, this is both a simple and hard question.

Dependency injection is a common technique to make source code more modular and to prevent hardcoded relations between classes. This makes it possible to configure which code to use at runtime. This is also known as ‘injection’.

Below I will show a simple example. It is based on the Unity framework (not related to the Unity 3D modeling editor or game engine). According to this blog, this is the second most popular framework. Choosing the right DI framework for you depends on many factors. I normally choose Unity because this was created by Microsoft (Stay close to the Vorlons).