Author Archives: Brandon

Schedule internet access for devices in your home using IFTTT and Disney’s Circle

Disney’s new Circle internet parental control service provides good feature on its free tier that can be enhanced with other services. Here’s how you can use IFTTT to schedule the internet to turn on and off for your entire household or just specific devices in your household.

Using Azure API Management to prevent Denial of Wallet attacks

While it would be high near impossible to DDoS a solution running on a serverless platform (scaling would just continue to handle all the requests it needed to), somebody still has to pay for the execution. Most (good) serverless implementations use what is often called “micro-billing” whereby you are billed only for each *actual execution* of your code. But, if we think of this nefariously and I send a few thousand requests/second to your endpoints guess what happens. Yup, one hefty bill. This has become known as a Denial of Wallet attack.

Using Middleware to trap Exceptions in Asp.Net Core

Recently while working on a project I found myself writing a ton of boilerplate code throughout that looked something like this: private readonly Lazy<JSchema> _newItemSchema = new Lazy<JSchema>(() => Helpers.GetSchema(@"POST-request.json")); [HttpPost] public async Task<IActionResult> AddNewItem() { var requestJson = Request.ParseBodyToObject(_newItemSchema.Value); if (!requestJson.Success) { #if DEBUG return BadRequest(requestJson.Object); #else return BadRequest(); #endif } var newItem =… Read More »

On-schedule and On-demand Azure VMs using Runbooks + Microsoft Flow

Since using the new Azure “V2” VMs I had a complaint: I can’t (easily) set up a schedule for my VMs like I was able to with Classic VMs and the Classic Management dashboard. I recently set up a Minecraft server for my sons and was turning it on when they got home from school… Read More »

Feedback Hub for everybody!

On August 29th, the Windows Dev Center got a massive feature set upgrade. Included among these new features was the announcement of the Microsoft Store Services Engagement Framework. Like the name implies, this is a new framework put out by the Store team enabling developers to better engage with their users – and new store… Read More »

My slides from Twin Cities Code Camp #20

As promised, my slides from my Continuous Deployment in Mobile Applications talk at Twin Cities Code Camp 20 can be found below! If you have questions, please post them in the Disqus thread so we may all benefit from the conversation. A few attendees also expressed interest in my session from TCCC17 so I\’ve also… Read More »