Background I have an Azure Static Website that is built from a GitHub hosted repo using the default Action Workflow automation created by Azure when setting up the static site. A really nice feature of this configuration is that when a PR is created in GitHub a test static website environment site is built in Azure to …

About Rik Hepworth As Chief Consulting Officer at Black Marble, Rik helps organisations large and small use Cloud better. Whether that is a new adoption where governance and management are key, or an application modernisation project where technology choice and team knowledge are important factors in success. Through …

Not every project can host services in the cloud. If you have a local environment running on virtual machines, connecting to that from the Android emulator running on the same host can be tricky. This post details the solution I use and the tools needed to enable it. Detailing the problem At Black Marble we don’t just …

Overview The recent work that I have been doing with Standard Logic Apps and linking them as backends to Azure API Management has relied on the use of the Logic App Workflow SAS key for security. This is a valid authentication approach, but there are risks that you need to be aware of as well as best practices that you …

The Issue This site was built using Hugo, a static site generator. I recently tried to do a long overdue update the version of Hugo from 0.108 to the current 0.122 version. I had not expected any problems, but found that the site failed to render, but with no error message all I saw was 1hugo.exe server --logLevel info …

I was recently trying to create an Azure DevOps work item when an email is received using the Power Automate 'Create an Azure DevOps work item when email arrives with 'Bug' in subject' template. The flow created without issue, and all the drop downs were correctly populated with O365 and Azure DevOps values as …

Problem Space Over the years of developing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with either ARM templates or Bicep (since it was released in 2020), I have made it my best practice where possible to use well-defined base type parameters (Strings | Integers | Booleans) so that the templates are usable and maintainable by …

Bicep is a great improvement over ARM Templates but doesn’t remove the need to validate our code at build time. I could continue to use the ARM-TTK and validate the generated template, but bicep has it’s own built in rules. Getting build errors in a way that can provide meaningful information in my CI/CD tooling is an …

Issue Many development tools rely on the fact that git.exe is installed to perform source control operations e.g. VSCode. However, a common problem I have seen is that security settings on many corporate Windows devices do not allow the installation of git CLI using an MSI file by the user. VSCode is an approved …

Overview After setting up a Logic App (Standard) Backend in Azure API Management (APIM) in my last post, I wanted to try and see if I could create a Swagger definition from a Standard Logic App which could then be used to simplify the API authoring process in APIM. This post shows my methods of doing so. If you …