Centralized Configuration for .NET Core using Azure Cosmos DB and Narad

We are living in a micro services world. All these services are generally hosted in Docker container which are ephemeral. Moreover these service need to start themselves up, talk to each other, etc. All this needs configuration and there are many commercially available configuration providers like Spring Cloud Config Server, Consul etc. These are excellent tools which provide a lot more functionality than just storing configuration data. However all these have a weakness - they have a single point of failure - their storage mechanism be it a file system, database etc. There are ways to work around those but if you want a really simple place to store configuration values and at the same time make it highly available, with guaranteed global availability and millisecond reads, what can be a better tool than Azure Cosmos DB!

So I set forth on this journey for ASP.NET Core projects to talk to Cosmos DB to retrieve their configuration data. For inspiration I looked at Steeltoe Configuration Provider and modified it to support Azure Cosmos DB. Enter Narad - an Azure Cosmos DB Configuration Provider for .NET Core.

To use Narad, first create a Cosmos DB database and upload your configuration data as JSON file in one of the collection. There are excellent instructions available on MSDN docs on how to do this. ~~Next clone or download it from GitHub repository and add the reference to "Narad.Extensions.Configuration.CosmosDBCore"~~. Narad is now available as a Nuget package. Search for "Narad.Extensions.Configuration.CosmosDBCore" or follow this link - https://www.nuget.org/packages/Narad.Extensions.Configuration.CosmosDBCore/.Also in your appsettings.json, you will have to provide the following details:

The database and collection name can be whatever you want. Next in Program.cs, add the AddCosmosDB() method. You are done! Optionally you can also bind your configuration POCO class to the configuration values retrieved from Cosmos DB as shown in the Startup.cs.

You can find the complete source code as well as sample client on GitHub - https://github.com/mayankthebest/Narad

Integrating React with SonarQube using Azure DevOps Pipelines

In the world of automation, code quality is of paramount importance. SonarQube and Azure DevOps are two tools which solve this problem in a continuous and automated way. They play well for a majority of languages and frameworks. However, to make the integration work for React applications still remains a challenge. In this post we will explore how we can integrate a React application to SonarQube using Azure DevOps pipelines to continuously build and assess code quality. Creating the React Application Let's start at the beginning. We will use npx to create a Typescript based React app. Why Typescript? I find it easier to work and more maintainable owing to its strongly-typed behavior. You can very well follow this guide for jsx based applications too. We will use the fantastic Create-React-App (CRA) tool to create a React application called ' sonar-azuredevops-app '. > npx create-react-app sonar-azuredevops-app --template typescript Once the project creation is done, we

App-pocalypse

Have you recently tried to shop on any Indian e-commerce website? If you have, you too would be frustrated by the constant nagging done by these sites to download their app. Myntra has gone ahead and shut its website down completely! Others like Flipkart won't let you browse any product in peace and will immediately try to "connect" you to their app - even when you are already at their site and trying to buy a product. Amazon India will release "app-only" offers and discounts. All this is done in the garb of making customer experience better. @mayankMSFT We direct users to the mobile App in order to provide better shopping experience. We have passed your feedback along. — flipkartsupport (@flipkartsupport) August 7, 2015 Only problem is that it makes user experience even worse. These companies are trying to lure the consumer into a walled garden so that they make bad, misinformed buying decisions . Let me elaborate. On a desktop browser

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