Azure Pipelines has been interesting to me especially given the generous free open source tier and seemingly instant availability of build agents. The setup is easy if you're building .NET targets with lots of useful starters available.

Some areas have been frustrating, specifically build variables, the difficulty in getting the app installed, and the limitations on triggers if you can't (non-GitHub apps can't be installed on Enterprise accounts even if FREE).

I do enjoy discussion and debate, whether designing software or writing articles. Many times the comments have explored the subject further or offered corrections or additional insights and tips. They are vital on my blog, and I was disappointed that Jekyll provides nothing out of the box to handle them.

Third-party solutions like Disqus exist that require you either pay a subscription or have ads inlined with the comments. That $9/month adds up. The alternative of injecting ads onto my blog to support comment infrastructure doesn't sit right with me.

I've been working on porting over my blog to a static site generator. I fired up an Azure Function to handle the form-comment to PR process to enable user comments to still be part of the site without using a 3rd party commenting system - more on that in the next post - and found the ASP.NET model binding for form posts distinctly lacking.

It's been great getting back into .NET and brushing up some skills making the code clear, short and reusable. What I wanted was a super-clear action on my controller that tried to collect, validate and sanitize the data then, if all was well, create the pull request or report errors.

I've been messing around in the .NET ecosystem again, jumping back in with Azure Functions (similar to AWS Lambda) to get my blog onto 99% static hosting. I immediately ran into the API changes between v1 and v2 (currently in beta).

These changes are because v1 was based around .NET 4.6 using WebAPI 2 while v2 is based on ASP.NET Core which uses MVC 6. There are some guides around conversion, but none in the context of Azure Functions.

If you’re coming from an ORM background to Azure Table Storage, you might be wondering how to map class hierarchies to tables.

Documentation on the topic is hard to find unless you know the magic class name EntityResolver which you can discover by digging into the Azure Client for .NET source code.