https://codez.deedx.cz/ Recent content in Welcome on Martin CodeZ Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Tue, 17 Oct 2017 18:03:08 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/ical-calendar-custom-schedule/ Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:45:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/ical-calendar-custom-schedule/ My town has a specific garbage collection schedule. We have 4 bins at home: general waste (black), paper (blue), plastic (yellow), and bio waste (brown). The first three get collected on Wednesdays, bio gets collected on Tuesdays. So far quite simple, right? The first issue is that black, blue, and yellow are on a rotating schedule: Wednesday 1: black --> Wed 2: blue --> Wed 3: black --> Wed 4: yellow --> Wed 5: black . https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/disable-web-search-windows11-start/ Mon, 13 May 2024 09:25:52 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/disable-web-search-windows11-start/ Like many others I find the web search results in the Windows Start menu useless and annoying. Turns out, they slow down the experience as well. Fortunately, there's a way to disable this functionality through a registry change. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search. Create new DWORD 32-bit value. Call it BingSearchEnabled. Leave value as 0. First spotted on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ultrawide219/status/1786104392753766466 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/synology-camera-records-on-usb-drive/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:09:45 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/synology-camera-records-on-usb-drive/ I've been concerned for a while about my IP cameras hammering the drives on my Synology NAS with non-stop recording, so I decided to find a way to ease the load a little bit. An obvious choice would be to use one the USB (or eSATA) ports and plug an external drive to it. Unfortunately, Synology (Surveillance Station) doesn't officially support this - according to the forums the reason is that they couldn't guarantee the marketed performance levels. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/sudo-stopped-working-on-synology/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 18:30:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/sudo-stopped-working-on-synology/ I'm using my home Synology NAS to run Docker containers with various services and APIs that I use locally in my network. One of my containers is hosted on the GitHub Container Registry, which is not supported in the NAS GUI, so I had to use SSH to authenticate to this registry and download Docker images manually. Except for the annoying fact that every sudo required me to re-enter my admin password, this worked fine. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/using-playwright-with-dotnet-api-and-docker/ Tue, 31 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/using-playwright-with-dotnet-api-and-docker/ In my ePaper project I needed to generate a screenshot of a rendered HTML page and quickly realized that the easiest method would be to use https://playwright.dev. In this post I'm going to note how I achieved the following: Use Playwright from a .NET API to generate webpage screenshot. Bake Playwright into a Docker image, alongside the main application. Using Playwright from .NET It is possible to run Playwright from . https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/homeassistant-parametrized-http-call/ Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:00:13 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/homeassistant-parametrized-http-call/ I've built an API which generates some content that is consumed by other devices. Since this operation is somewhat long-running (~25 seconds) and since devices don't require the freshest content, I wanted to have an automated job that calls the API every 20 minutes. CRON would be the obvious choice, but as I'm running Home Assistant in my network, I looked at automations as a way to issue these regular HTTP calls. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/msedge-disable-auto-https-for-localhost/ Wed, 17 May 2023 17:30:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/msedge-disable-auto-https-for-localhost/ I noticed recently that logging into various CLI tools (Azure DevOps CLI, GitHub, etc.) wasn't working for me - browser window opened, I signed in, gave permissions, and ended with an invalid request on https://localhost....... What happens is a normal browser OAuth flow, which opens redirect to localhost with authorization code when done. The problem was that my Microsoft Edge started forcing HTTPS. Even when I manually changed the URL in the address bar to http://localhost. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/load-testing-azure-jmeter/ Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/load-testing-azure-jmeter/ A couple of notes collected when creating load tests with JMeter and the Azure Load Testing service. Parametrized runs Add User Defined Variables, specify a variable and add this function call as the Value: ${__BeanShell( System.getenv("target_url") )} When creating the load test run, specify environment vairables like this: Use output from an HTTP call as a variable in other steps A common scenario when moving to more dynamic tests: Fetch a list of items from an API as JSON. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/call-cosmosdb-rest-api-with-csharp/ Thu, 23 Jun 2022 21:41:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/call-cosmosdb-rest-api-with-csharp/ A short one for me to remember. Cosmos DB, as many other Azure services, provides a REST API which allows developers to access data directly, without relying on the SDK or special tools. I wouldn't recommend using it regularly in a production application, but it can be handy for quick experiments and PoC validations. In my case I wanted to generate a set of documents (10 000) to validate that my application performs as expected. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/using-logitech-brio-for-windows-hello-closed-lid/ Tue, 03 May 2022 09:46:02 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/using-logitech-brio-for-windows-hello-closed-lid/ As of today (May 2022), Windows 11 doesn't use an external camera, configured for Windows Hello, when the laptop lid is closed. I recently bought the Logitech Brio 4K webcam, which has the IR camera compatible with Hello and wanted to use it when sitting at my desk with my Surface Laptop aside and closed. After some internet searching it became clear that this is a long-existing problem (or maybe a feature) and people have figured out the solution: https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/auto-update-keyvault-secrets-net-kubernetes/ Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/auto-update-keyvault-secrets-net-kubernetes/ At one point during development, my team and I realized that our web application, running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), is not rotating secrets correctly. Specifically, when a connection string was changed in Azure Key Vault, the .NET app didn't pick up the change, despite having reloadOnChange enabled and working fine during local development on Windows. Setup: ASP.NET Core 6 API running as Docker container in AKS using Secrets Store CSI driver to get secrets from Azure Key Vault as files Turns out that file changes in Docker (and Linux, according to my experiments) are not always properly reported to the file system watcher and polling needs to be enabled. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/automating-azure-ad-b2c-creation-with-terraform/ Thu, 13 Jan 2022 13:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/automating-azure-ad-b2c-creation-with-terraform/ This post is a continuation of my Azure AD B2C scripting journey... Azure B2C custom user attributes with PowerShell Core Automating Azure B2C creation with PowerShell Core Update Redirect URIs from Azure DevOps Automating Azure B2C creation with Terraform There's also a GitHub repository with full scripts. After having fun with PowerShell Core and Azure AD B2C in the previous blogposts, I still wondered about Terraform. I know it's not possible to create 100% of the resources, but how far can it get me? https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/update-redirect-uris-from-azure-devops/ Tue, 30 Nov 2021 22:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/update-redirect-uris-from-azure-devops/ This post is a continuation of my Azure AD B2C scripting journey... Azure B2C custom user attributes with PowerShell Core Automating Azure B2C creation with PowerShell Core Update Redirect URIs from Azure DevOps Automating Azure AD B2C creation with Terraform There's also a GitHub repository with full scripts. Scenario Imagine a situation where developers are able to deploy on demand cloud environments to test their feature branches, using Azure DevOps pipelines. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/automating-azure-ad-b2c-creation-with-powershell/ Fri, 26 Nov 2021 12:50:29 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/automating-azure-ad-b2c-creation-with-powershell/ This post is a continuation of my Azure AD B2C scripting journey... Azure B2C custom user attributes with PowerShell Core Automating Azure B2C creation with PowerShell Core Update Redirect URIs from Azure DevOps Automating Azure AD B2C creation with Terraform There's also a GitHub repository with full scripts. Creating an Azure AD B2C tenant manually, using the Azure Portal, is relatively simple task mainly thanks to the UI, which directs your steps quite well. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/vs-code-performance-checklist/ Mon, 01 Nov 2021 18:40:30 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/vs-code-performance-checklist/ Recently I was helping a customer investigate "poor performance" when working with Visual Studio Code. The specifics aren't important, but I put together a list of things (tools, techniques) to look at when dealing with VS Code performance, which might come handy. It's clear that "poor performance" can mean anything from slow startup, sluggish user interface to underperforming debugged applications. This list tries to cover all and will be updated over time. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/b2c-users-with-custom-attributes-powershell/ Wed, 29 Sep 2021 13:26:14 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/b2c-users-with-custom-attributes-powershell/ This post is a beginning of my Azure AD B2C scripting journey... Azure B2C custom user attributes with PowerShell Core Automating Azure B2C creation with PowerShell Core Update Redirect URIs from Azure DevOps Automating Azure AD B2C creation with Terraform There's also a GitHub repository with full scripts. For a recent project I was writing a provisioning script for test users in Azure AD B2C. As straightforward as it may look, there are some difficulties when it comes to custom attributes (extension properties, custom claims - these all refer to the same thing in this context) and creating users that have them. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/ssl-and-certificates-notes/ Thu, 29 Jul 2021 15:16:25 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/ssl-and-certificates-notes/ Occasionaly I have to deal with certs and because it's only from time to time, I always have to search the internet to get the right commands. This post is a compilation of notes and tools which I used, so that I don't have to look for them again. Self-signed certificate Goal: Simply get a certificate, locally, without authority or validation. Solution: # generate key openssl genrsa -out cert.key 2048 # generate CSR request openssl req -new -key cert. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/web-apps-mount-azure-storage-in-arm/ Mon, 15 Feb 2021 20:44:01 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/web-apps-mount-azure-storage-in-arm/ Azure App Service on Linux and Web Apps for containers have the option to mount Azure Storage container to a specific path as a network share. This feature is currently (02/2021) in preview and Microsoft Docs contain only instructions for Azure CLI, but not for Resource Manager templates. This article is about that - using ARM template to mount Azure File Storage to a Docker container running on Azure Web Apps. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-to-ssh-into-web-app-instance/ Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-to-ssh-into-web-app-instance/ Opening an SSH session to a Linux container Azure App Service is an easy task (there's even a Docs article with this exact name). What isn't so straightforward is a scale out scenario where you want to connect to a specific instance out of many - for example to debug or collect dumps. One method would be scaling down to 1 instance and just using standard ways of connecting to it. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-mysql-redirect-without-docker/ Tue, 08 Dec 2020 14:45:03 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-mysql-redirect-without-docker/ Both Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for MariaDB support the redirection functionality, which improves application performance in situations when the application establishes several connections during request processing. Redirection basically bypasses the Azure database gateway after establishing the first connection to an available server. This article is about using the mysqlnd_azure extension for PHP, running on Azure Web Apps for Linux, without custom Docker container. If you don't have specific requirements against Docker, I suggest taking a look at Heyko's post, which describes the process of creating a custom image with mysqlnd_azure baked in and demonstrates how to deploy it to Azure Web Apps. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/unified-surface-for-multiple-apis/ Thu, 16 Jul 2020 13:20:54 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/unified-surface-for-multiple-apis/ The API Management service (APIM) in Azure became quite powerful since I last played with it a few years ago. The extent of custom scripting that can be done for instance with rewrite rules is quite high and this blogpost documents one use case where APIM rules enable the creation of unified API umbrella over a dynamically changing APIs. Situation Let's imagine a dynamic infrastructure where developers can provision (and tear down) test environments in the cloud to test the features they're working on. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/renaming-azure-devops-build/ Tue, 14 Jul 2020 16:08:49 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/renaming-azure-devops-build/ Sometimes (almost always) it becomes handy to modify the name automatically assigned to Azure DevOps build or release. For instance, when the application version is defined in code (appsettings.json or AssemblyInfo.cs) it's useful to see it in the build name. Azure DevOps has an easy but not very flexible way of specifying the build name with Build number format: There are a few variables available to use here, but it doesn't help in a situation where you need a value which is not known at the time of build creation. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-policy-convert-string-to-number/ Mon, 13 Jul 2020 21:25:10 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-policy-convert-string-to-number/ A quick one. I needed to create an Azure Policy which would limit the maximum number of instances that can be set for Web Apps auto-scaling. While policies are quite straight-forward and easy to set up, this one came with a complication. I needed to detect if the maximum number of instances was set to a number greater than 6 and deny that. The field I evaluated was Microsoft.Insights/autoscalesettings/profiles[*].capacity.maximum which is defined in the ARM schema as string. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/dynamic-subnet-calculation-cidr-terraform/ Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:07:02 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/dynamic-subnet-calculation-cidr-terraform/ Networking is fun... In a recent project I got the chance to calculate subnet addresses and masks. The last time I did this was probably 15 years ago at school, so it was a good refresher. Nontheless, having tools which can help with CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) calculations is always good. This post is about provisioning Azure Subnet dynamically with calculated CIDR address using Terraform. tl;dr Use cidrsubnet function in Terraform to calculate subnet addresses within an IP address space. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-devops-set-release-variable-during-run/ Mon, 08 Jun 2020 22:40:49 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-devops-set-release-variable-during-run/ Azure DevOps (ADO) has nice hierarchy of variables and dynamic values - you can define high-level variable groups and then specific variables which can be modified before starting a release. But what about being a little more dynamic and changing pipeline variables during execution? To be available for all stages? Turns out that sharing information between stages in release pipeline is not as simple as it could be. This post talks about the "classic" definition of pipelines where Builds and Releases are separate. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/flush-redis-cache-from-azure-devops/ Sun, 17 May 2020 19:00:43 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/flush-redis-cache-from-azure-devops/ In a recent customer project we were building Azure DevOps (ADO) Release pipelines which deployed an updated Linux container to Azure Web Apps and since updates to this container usually meant changes to cached user paths at a website, we needed to invalidate/empty/flush Azure Redis cache. What was our surprise when we discovered that there's no easy way in ADO to this - no first-party task, no easy Azure CLI command. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/resting-like-a-boss-postman-alternative/ Wed, 22 Jan 2020 16:50:11 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/resting-like-a-boss-postman-alternative/ I'm a huge fan of the modern move to separate frontends and backends with APIs and HTTP(S) communication. To test those APIs I've been using Postman, but it wasn't always a good experience - requests are difficult to share, the app itself is slow and sometimes, after an update, loses data. That's why I went to search for a replacement. And found it. Warning: Don't let the title of this article lead you astray. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/weekly-change-report-app-insights-logic-apps/ Sat, 21 Dec 2019 23:39:37 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/weekly-change-report-app-insights-logic-apps/ I'm getting married next year (yay! 🥳) and I have built a website for my wedding (of course). We use it to provide our guests with basic information about the event and also to track their attendance ("RSVP") and whether they will spend the night or not ("Overnight"). I quickly figured that we also need some kind of notification mechanism to let us know about changes happening on the site (guests confirming, changing their minds etc. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-search-indexer-with-json-array/ Tue, 17 Sep 2019 16:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-search-indexer-with-json-array/ Azure Search is powerful service for knowledge extraction. One of the nice things it can do is ingest and parse various types of files from Azure Storage and make them searchable. This article describes how to work with more complex JSON documents. While it's possible to use the Azure Portal for index definition, recommended ways for iterative development are either REST or SDK. I used the C# SDK, because that's closer to me. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/bulk-audio-transcription/ Tue, 20 Aug 2019 10:48:25 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/bulk-audio-transcription/ Since Build 2019 the Azure Speech service supports bulk audio transcription for files stored in Azure Storage. The API is a little bit hidden, so this article describes how to work with it. tl;dr To perform bulk transcription, upload audio files to storage container, generate SAS URL and call: POST https://<region>.cris.ai/api/speechtotext/v2.1/transcriptions Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <speech key> Content-Type: application/json { "results": [], "recordingsUrls": [ "<SAS URL>" ], "models": [ { "id": "bc803022-6339-4746-a0b1-27d97888bde0" } ], "locale": "en-US", "name": "Bulk transcription", "properties": { "PunctuationMode": "DictatedAndAutomatic", "ProfanityFilterMode": "Masked", "AddWordLevelTimestamps": "False", "AddSentiment": "False" } } Detailed instructions follow. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/sharing-containers-from-private-registry-in-azure/ Tue, 16 Jul 2019 20:44:11 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/sharing-containers-from-private-registry-in-azure/ Several times I found myself in a situation where I built a Docker container and wanted someone else to be able to use it, without the image being completely public. Docker Hub gives one private repo for free, but that's not much, so I learned how to share containers through Microsoft Azure. tl;dr This post is about using Azure Container Registry along with Azure Container Instances and Azure Active Directory to host and share Docker images (Duckling in this example). https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/speech-transcripts-from-local-machine/ Wed, 03 Jul 2019 16:14:11 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/speech-transcripts-from-local-machine/ Azure Speech Service offers the ability to send longer pieces of audio (such as phone call recordings, video recordings etc.) to the batch transcription endpoint and after a while get text representation of this audio. Source files are usually provided through Azure Blob Storage, because they need to be available online and the service proactively downloads them. But for development and smaller amounts of data it might be tedious to upload everything to Storage and it might be convenient to host files from local machine directly. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/web-chat-events-summary/ Mon, 01 Jul 2019 13:33:46 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/web-chat-events-summary/ Simple cheat sheet which might come handy when you start working with the (very cool) back channel in Bot Framework's Web Chat component. WEB_CHAT Event Payload WEB_CHAT/MARK_ACTIVITY { activityID, name, value } WEB_CHAT/SEND_EVENT { (string) name, (string) value } WEB_CHAT/SEND_MESSAGE { (string) method, (string) text } WEB_CHAT/SET_LANGUAGE { language } WEB_CHAT/SET_REFERENCE_GRAMMAR_ID { referenceGrammarID } WEB_CHAT/SET_SEND_BOX { (string) text } WEB_CHAT/SET_SEND_TIMEOUT { sendTimeout } WEB_CHAT/SET_SEND_TYPING_INDICATOR { (bool) sendTypingIndicator } WEB_CHAT/SET_SUGGESTED_ACTIONS { (array, default: []) suggestedActions } WEB_CHAT/START_SPEAKING N/A WEB_CHAT/STOP_DICTATE N/A WEB_CHAT/STOP_SPEAKING N/A WEB_CHAT/SUBMIT_SEND_BOX { (string, default: 'keyboard') method } How to send This example sends new event with custom name when Direct Line connection is established: https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/managing-azure-from-dotnet/ Sun, 02 Jun 2019 15:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/managing-azure-from-dotnet/ To automatically update my podcast site, I'm using Azure Functions and SoundCloud RSS. Besides uploading the files to Azure Storage, I also need to purge the CDN endpoint to refresh it for everyone (the update happens twice a month so it's not a big deal to do the purge every time). This is where the Azure Management SDK comes into play. Controlling Azure resources from server code can be useful in many automation scenarios. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/openvpn-tunnel-with-azure/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 18:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/openvpn-tunnel-with-azure/ I'm sure you know the feeling. At the airport, connecting to their free Wi-Fi, no password, zero encryption, hoping it's not just some pineapple, sniffing your packets. And even though most of the communication done over the internet these days is encrypted, it still doesn't feel right. How about wireless networks at hotels? Need to get some work done, but ouch, RDP is blocked... Only HTTP/HTTPS for you this time. Besides security (which suffers from the same issues as the aiport), limited connectivity is a legitimate reason to start thinking about personal VPN. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/choiceprompt-with-buttons-in-teams/ Mon, 01 Apr 2019 14:21:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/choiceprompt-with-buttons-in-teams/ Microsoft's Bot Framework SDK in it's latest iteration (v4) continues with the tradition of providing developers with useful pre-made dialogs which handle most common user inputs (Date, Choice, Text...). While the framework tries to present dialogs in the best possible way for given channel, sometimes it just doesn't. In this case the issue is with ChoicePrompt's fallback to text options in Microsoft Teams channel. When you use ChoicePrompt as described in samples and docs in the Web Chat or Facebook Messenger, you will get nice buttons that disappear when clicked. https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-powershell/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 22:08:42 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-powershell/ A few snippets of PowerShell I've found useful over and over again. Most of them are just syntax/functions that I'm unable to remember, some of them might be more complex. It’s a living document, I keep updating it. XML parsing $xmlDoc = [XML](Get-Content $filePath) $xmlDoc.Element.Subelement.setAttribute("Attr", $value); $xmlDoc.Save($filePath) JSON parsing $jsonDoc = Get-Content $filePath | Out-String | ConvertFrom-Json Convert from JSON to object and don't shrink single-element arrays into non-array objects: https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/interactive-csharp-on-linux/ Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:40:53 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/interactive-csharp-on-linux/ C# interactive is a handy tool inside Visual Studio (powered by Roslyn), which allows you to experiment with blocks of C# code without the need to load up whole new solution. This post is about dotnet-script, a global dotnet CLI tool, which works everywhere where .NET Core runs and provides the same functionality as C# interactive. Why? If you do cross-platform development with .NET Core (which is perfecly feasible and you should totally do it), you might get into situations where you need to test how the framework behaves on different platforms. https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-csharp/ Tue, 05 Feb 2019 22:56:53 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-csharp/ I often find myself searching the internet for the same four lines of C# all over again, because of my inability to remember anything and the complexity of my filesystem structure... That's why I decided to start putting together quick snippets of Frequently Used Code (FUC). This one is about ASP.NET Core. It's a living document, I keep updating it. .NET Core CLI - change UI language to English set DOTNET_CLI_UI_LANGUAGE=en Merge array of strings into a single string So simple that I'm ahsamed that I'm searching for it all over again. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/parsing-soundcloud-rss-with-net/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 14:49:11 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/parsing-soundcloud-rss-with-net/ If you're into podcasting, you've probably noticed that RSS is still alive! Podcasts are not downloaded directly from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music etc., these directories just aggregate your RSS feed, display information to listeners and redirect them to your audio file for listening/download. What is this about? This post describes the process of extracting information from SoundCloud RSS feed in C# to generate static website. Background My goal was to create a static website (no WordPress or other CRM) and avoid duplication of data input. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/continuous-speech-to-text/ Fri, 04 Jan 2019 15:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/continuous-speech-to-text/ Navigating current Microsoft's offering of speech to text (S2T) services can get quite confusing. There are several services, which seemingly do the same, and twice as much SDKs. Fortunately, Cognitive Services team introduced the new Speech service, which covers traditional Bing Speech API, Custom Speech and Speech Translator under one umbrella. [This post was massively updated in January 2019 to reflect significant improvements in the service which happened by the end of 2018. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/format-timespan-powershell/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 13:43:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/format-timespan-powershell/ TimeSpan is a structure which represents a time interval. Working with TimeSpans in PowerShell can be similar to .NET, or can be made a little easier by using native PowerShell functionality. In my scenario, I needed to parse a certain point in time, defined by miliseconds, and then output this TimeSpan in a very strict form: # get from miliseconds: 2500045000 # to exactly this format: 00:00:00.000 # hours:minutes:seconds.miliseconds (3 numbers) How to achieve this goal in PowerShell? https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-pipelines-as-build-for-github/ Tue, 06 Nov 2018 13:22:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/azure-pipelines-as-build-for-github/ While it is possible to create public repositories for free with Azure DevOps (recently renamed from Visual Studio Team Services), it's still true that GitHub is the developer's social network. I personally prefer GitHub for public, community driven and open-source work, and Azure DevOps for private projects. This article is about setting up the build and release pipeline for GitHub using Azure DevOps. Outline: Background Build Building .NET Core console app Trigger Multi-configuration build Release Considerations Background When I was getting ready to make my Azure Speech CLI tool public, I was thinking about a way how to provide compiled builds to developers who don't necessarily have the need to clone the repo, fire up Visual Studio (or . https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/bot-web-communication/ Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:21:14 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/bot-web-communication/ This article refers to Web Chat v3. Current version (v4) uses a slightly different approach. See samples for reference. I really like the open-source Web Chat component for Microsoft Bot Framework / Bot Service. I've seen developers doing magical things with it - completely changing the look and feel, adding people's icons, embedding HTML forms, redesigning buttons and the interface overall etc. In this article I want to make note of a powerful, yet often overlooked, feature called "back channel". https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/event-grid-deployment-with-azure-cli/ Wed, 22 Aug 2018 13:11:25 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/event-grid-deployment-with-azure-cli/ I wanted to trigger Azure Function by an event sent to Event Grid, which is an easy and well documented task. It's getting more difficult when you don't use Azure Portal and want to set everything up using command line. There are certain combinations of services which make automated deployment not as simple as JSON template. One of them is Bot Service with Azure Active Directory (post coming soon), but in this article I'm going to look into Event Grid + Azure Functions combo. https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-azure-sdks/ Tue, 21 Aug 2018 16:21:32 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-azure-sdks/ I often find myself searching the internet for the same four lines of C# all over again, because of my inability to remember anything and the complexity of my filesystem structure... That's why I decided to start putting together quick snippets of frequently used code (FUC). This one is about various Azure SDKs I work with. It's a living document, I've been updating it over time. Storage Tables Update: There's an SDK specifically for Azure Tables now - Azure. https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/extending-chatbot-platform-with-azure/ Tue, 31 Jul 2018 11:00:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/extending-chatbot-platform-with-azure/ Together with Wingbot.ai and Česká spořitelna we have extended existing chatbot framework with support for Microsoft Azure Bot Service and deployment to Microsoft Azure. Motivation There are many chatbot frameworks out there. And although Microsoft's Bot Builder SDK is the recommended way of working with Azure Bot Service, not everyone is able (or keen) to use it. In our case the customer has picked Wingbot.ai as their bot building platform and it was up to some engineering magic to add Azure support to it. https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-git/ Mon, 30 Jul 2018 10:49:00 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-git/ Visual Studio (both Code and 2017) has a nice set of tools to work with Git, but when it comes to more complex source control magic, I still prefer to roll my sleeves up and dive into the console. Here is my cheat sheet with commands that are not used that often, but come handy from time to time. I started this cheat sheet based on a great article written by Michael Kohl. https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-aspnet-core/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 21:40:42 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/cheats/cheat-sheet-aspnet-core/ I often find myself searching the internet for the same four lines of C# all over again, because of my inability to remember anything and the complexity of my filesystem structure... That's why I decided to start putting together quick snippets of Frequently Used Code (FUC). This one is about ASP.NET Core. It's a living document, I keep updating it. Enable CORS on REST API Startup.cs -> ConfigureServices(): services.AddCors(); Startup.cs -> Configure(): https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/csharp-async-main/ Thu, 21 Jun 2018 14:20:59 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/csharp-async-main/ C# 7.1 extended valid signatures for the static Main() method to allow the async keyword. Valid starting points of .NET applications are now: public static void Main(); public static int Main(); public static void Main(string[] args); public static int Main(string[] args); public static Task Main(); public static Task<int> Main(); public static Task Main(string[] args); public static Task<int> Main(string[] args); Thanks to the Task return type, it's now possible to use async/await with Main. https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/building-ai-powered-store/ Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:06:17 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/building-ai-powered-store/ We were happy to host Prague Data Management Meetup at Microsoft on Tuesday and offered attendees a showcase of our comprehensive retail demo which runs in our Prague office. Second part of the meeting was a presentation about the technology we have used to build first generation of this demo (last year, for the DOTS conference). Here are all slides from the talk, along with links: https://microsoft.github.io/techcasestudies/cognitive%20services/2017/08/04/BlackRadley.html https://microsoft.github.io/techcasestudies/iot/2016/12/23/BlueDynamic.html https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/cloudservices/cognitiveservices https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dpia-azure https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/wug-days-2018/ Sun, 08 Apr 2018 16:08:07 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/wug-days-2018/ The presentation was built as a list of practical recommendations and showcase of the "coolness" of Azure Functions, particularly in C#. First delivery at WUG Days 2018 in Brno. Here are the slides as PNGs, along with hyperlinks (where relevant): https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/from-iot-hub-to-sms/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-triggers-bindings https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/high-throughput-azure-functions-on-http/ https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/high-throughput-azure-functions-on-http/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/09/19/processing-100000-events-per-second-on-azure-functions/ https://itnext.io/building-single-page-app-with-azure-functions-and-improving-cold-start-time-79a0faec9913 https://github.com/Azure/app-service-announcements/issues/84 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-host-json https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/ https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/high-throughput-azure-functions-on-http/ Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:34:56 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/high-throughput-azure-functions-on-http/ Is the Azure Functions service able to achieve 1000 HTTP request per second without degradation in latency and reliability? Of course it is, that's what this article is about! Read on to learn more about considerations, fine-tuning and monitoring of a high-scale HTTP scenario. For those not familiar with Azure Functions - it's an application hosting service from the Microsoft Azure serverless family. You provide code, Functions take care of triggering it, scaling the infrastructure and management. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-to-run-load-test-from-visual-studio-on-custom-vsts-rig/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 17:26:27 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-to-run-load-test-from-visual-studio-on-custom-vsts-rig/ I was doing some load tests recently and while Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has a reasonable UI and provides with some free load testing minutes, I eventually needed to spin up my custom load testing rig in Azure. The classical approach with Test Controller and Test Agents would work fine, but it adds a layer of complexity and management which has already been solved by VSTS. Introduction There are several ways to run load test with the assistance of VSTS: https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/wordcamp-2018/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 11:00:00 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/wordcamp-2018/ Slides Slides can be downloaded from my OneDrive. Links https://devlog.deedx.cz/windows-mobile-6-5/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vyvojari/ https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ Demos Fast start: WordPress deployment template in Azure Marketplace. Automatically creates hosted MySQL database. Allows changing the PHP version and other hosting properties quickly. Docker for development: Docker for Windows in Azure virtual machine with Windows Server 2016. docker-compose.yml -> deploy mysql & wordpress:latest container. Changes happen in the html folder and immediately show up on the site. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/from-iot-hub-to-powerbi/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 21:22:36 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/from-iot-hub-to-powerbi/ This post is a loose follow-up to the From IoT Hub to SMS article I posted on December. Let's start with a question: "Do we need Stream Analytics do get data from IoT Hub to Power BI?" The answer is as usual: "sometimes you do, sometimes you don't..." For those not familiar, the traditional approach to IoT in Microsoft Azure is to connect the IoT device to IoT Hub, then let data flow through Stream Analytics and finally dump it anywhere you want to use it (SQL Database, CosmosDB, PowerBI etc. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/from-iot-hub-to-sms/ Mon, 04 Dec 2017 23:46:39 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/from-iot-hub-to-sms/ Let's imagine you're a manufacturer, running hundreds of machines in your factory. Each of those machines has three buttons attached to it. Pressing any of them sends a message to Azure which then makes sure that if the button means "alert, something is wrong!" a responsible operator/serviceman/manager gets a text message to their phone. Architecture To achieve this, we are going to combine Azure IoT Hub, Azure Functions and Twilio. All of them are nicely integrated, so it's very easy to get all the way from machine to SMS message. https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/signal-faces/ Thu, 30 Nov 2017 17:14:05 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/signal-faces/ "How could your computer vision technology work as part of an art installation?" When our friends from the Studio of Intermedia Work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague came to us with this question, we immediately took on the challenge. Under the creative lead of students and together with guys from Biceps Digital agency, we have built an art installation for Prague Signal Festival 2017. SIGNAL Festival is the largest cultural event in the Czech Republic, whose unique integration of art, city space, and modern technology has drawn over 1. https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/devtest-devops-prague-2017/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 23:34:46 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/devtest-devops-prague-2017/ During my talk in Prague on November 15th 2017 I show the following examples of Azure Management using the command line tools (CLI), Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and PowerShell (PS). Azure CLI Install Azure CLI. I used Bash for Ubuntu on Windows: echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli/ wheezy main" | \ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azure-cli.list sudo apt-key adv --keyserver packages.microsoft.com --recv-keys 52E16F86FEE04B979B07E28DB02C46DF417A0893 sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install azure-cli Try az to check that it works properly. https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/desktop-chatbot/ Fri, 10 Nov 2017 10:28:48 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/projects/desktop-chatbot/ Together with IT department and developers from the General University Hospital in Prague (VFN in short) we have built an internal chatbot for employees to search through their organization. When finalizing this solution we found it difficult to host the chatbot on an internal SharePoint site and decided to extend the solution with a desktop application. This article describes the process of creating a desktop hosting application, which can host any chatbot built using Microsoft's Bot Framework. https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/adding-telemetry-to-a-bot/ Wed, 01 Nov 2017 15:26:20 +0100 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/adding-telemetry-to-a-bot/ Building a chatbot is fun. Running it in production can be even more entertaining, but the golden rule always stays the same - no chatbot ever survives first encounter with real user. That's why it's necessary to track, monitor and adjust the conversation flow as your users enter their first questions and don't understand their first answers... Imagine a conversation like this: [Bot] Is there something I can help you with? https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/openslava-2017/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 10:28:48 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/talks/openslava-2017/ Last month I conducted a workshop and then gave a talk at the OpenSlava 2017 conference in Bratislava. Both were focused on Microsoft's Cognitive Services and here are the links: Workshop: Image Recognition with .NET Core on Github https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-is-it-built-continuously/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 11:32:31 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/posts/how-is-it-built-continuously/ Historically, I've been the PHP kind of blogger. I basically learned the programming language by coding a sophisticated guestbook component for my various websites. Dynamic blog engine followed (and is still running!), but then I finally realized that it's not the right time to write yet another MVC-CMS system and switched to WordPress. It works just fine, we use it at Microsoft and also my Czech dev-blog is powered by WordPress. https://codez.deedx.cz/about/ Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:08:41 +0200 https://codez.deedx.cz/about/ Welcome! This is a technical blog written by Martin Šimeček, in a language which isn't his native - English. Based in Prague, Czech Republic, I currently work for Microsoft as part of a global team with the ultimate goal of helping developers around the planet to achieve more. My work doesn't end with handing the source code over and going to production, because I ship when I share. Most of the projects I work on end on GitHub as open-source.