While threats are ever-increasing, so are the capabilities, methodologies, and technologies we have at our disposal to mitigate risks at a higher cadence than ever before. In this article, I'll talk about the responsibility we have as developers, solution architects, DevOps engineers, and anyone else involved in your teams. Security is a team effort, and everyone needs to get on board on what processes and rules to follow. Today we can automate a lot of the things we do for code quality and security, so the road to increasing the security posture doesn't have to be a long one. Regardless…
I have a lot of Azure Functions. Most of them are running on v2 with support for .NET Core 2.2 and netstandard2.0. During the upgrade process of my projects, I stumbled onto this several times across different projects: Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Host: Cannot bind parameter 'log' to type ILogger. The full message: [2019-12-17 8:10:32 PM] Error indexing method 'ControlApp' [2019-12-17 8:10:32 PM] Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Host: Error indexing method 'ControlApp'. Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Host: Cannot bind parameter 'log' to type ILogger. Make sure the parameter Type is supported by the binding. If you're using…
Over the years there's been a plethora of API's and approaches to work with artifacts and resources in Azure. In July this year (2019), Microsoft announced the availability of the new Azure SDK API Standards, which is a new set of SDK's in the following languages: Python, Java, JavaScript and .NET. These SDK's are supposed to be a unified approach to building the SDK's, and whatever goes into one API goes into all of them, so there's no disconnect between capabilities in different programming languages. Now that some Azure services have matured and been adopted into business-critical enterprise applications, we…
When working with Azure DevOps (or locally sometimes with Visual Studio), depending on what versions of the SDK you've got on your machines (local, or build agent), you may get the following error if there's a mismatch: Unable to locate the .NET Core SDK. Check that it is installed and that the version specified in global.json (if any) matches the installed version. A related error message that I also see regularly together with the one above is: error MSB4236: The SDK 'Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web' specified could not be found. I've stumbled onto this when the defined version of…
Azure Functions are usually tied to an Azure Storage Account by using App Settings. Unfortunately, when launching a new Function App project in Visual Studio, or watching demos and examples online, the connection string usually is in App Settings in plain text. In this post I'm sharing a quick tip on how to protect sensitive configuration values in App Settings by using Secrets from a Key Vault, and you can even reference the default Storage Account connection string this way, completely avoiding any type of sensitive data in App Settings, from scratch. Microsoft have some good documentation (links in the…
This post is about increasing automated security posture with Azure DevOps by using the "Microsoft Security Code Analysis extension", which is a set of tasks that helps implement security analysis of your files and code in your pipelines. Microsoft have done an amazing job with making this extension available, so we can make use of automated build tasks to check for some commonly encountered security issues. Follow me in this article to explore how we make use of the Azure DevOps extension for Microsoft Security Code Analysis, which includes these build tasks to help us: Credential Scanner (CredScan)BinSkimTSLintRoslyn AnalyzersMicrosoft…
At Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando, there was a plethora of interesting announcements. Some which are already available in your Azure subscriptions to try out. Two of these, which also are some favorites of mine to keep tabs on my resources easier across subscriptions, are the Network Insights and Storage Insights additions to Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor - Networks (preview)Network Insights also gives you the capability to do cross-subscription monitoring for your network health. From here, you can easily drill down into any part of your networking in the cloud and investigate if you have any issues going on,…
Launching new websites, services and applications in the cloud is easy. However, the fact that getting something up and running is easy, doesn't mean that it's sufficient for an enterprise-grade or distributed-scale application to operate in the long run. Designing the solution architecture, infrastructure and configuration of your apps and services are extremely important - and if you intend to embrace a real workload (not "see my demo here"), you need to ensure that things are flying at all times, with redundancy and failovers. In this post we'll talk a bit about diagnosing and troubleshooting errors and issues with Azure…