Azure Notification Hub race condition

Both development and production environments are deployed in a fully automated fashion using ARM templates. As part of these deployments we also create Notification Hubs and related authorization rules. I noticed today that some of our deployments were failing due to the fact that the Notification Hub resource provider was…

Setting App Service connection strings in ARM

For automatic deployment of test environments we are spinning up App Service instances and want to automatically set connection strings for the database and other services in the same template. According to the Azure Resource Manager documentation [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.web/2018-11-01/sites/config#connstringinfo-object]…

Run Visual Studio Test task in 64bit

All of our managed assemblies are build with the any cpu target and we can use both the 32-bit and 64-bit task runner of Azure Pipelines. One of our projects uses a C++ DLL that is either in 32-bit or 64-bit and we need a specific test runner (the 64-bit…

Download images with RestSharp

We are using RestSharp for functional testing of our backend services. As part of this process we need to upload images and compare the uploaded bytes against the expected result. RestSharp comes with a default parameter which sets the Accept header. The default is set to something like this: DefaultParameter…

Use Azure Artifacts outside of Visual Studio

One of the major tasks since starting at HorseAnalytics has been to streamline our development efforts. Centralize the codebase on Azure Repos, refactor the code so that it can not only be built on Windows but also on other platforms like Mac OS. One of the libraries that we use…

Remove data from BACPAC file

Today I needed to create a test database for one of the products I'm working on. In the backend it uses LINQ to SQL against a SQL Azure Database. Exporting the production database and cleaning it up with millions of records in it turned out to be not the most…