Development Archives - medienstudio.net

Testing Azure Functions v4 Node & TypeScript with Jest

To write and run tests for Azure Functions with Node / Typescript, we need a bit of extra setup. We’ll start with a new function project with an http trigger and then add the required dependencies:

npm install --save-dev jest typescript ts-jest @types/jest ts-node

I added ts-node as an additional dependency which is not listed in the ts-jest Getting started but required to run the tests.

Deploying to Azure Static Web Apps in Azure DevOps

I have started moving several static websites & SPAs from “Static website hosting in Azure Storage” to Azure Static Web Apps (SWA). Main reason for this is the limitation of using apex domains with Azure CDN which is the only way to use custom domains on websites hosted with Azure Storage. This is not an issue with Static Websites where you can use ALIAS, CNAME or A Records to map your domains. And with two custom domains available in the free tier this is now my go-to default.

Azure Functions + Storage with Managed Identity via Bicep

Today I needed to migrate an Azure Functions project that used to connect to Azure Storage with a normal connection string. Since that’s prohibited by policy in my new Azure subscription, we needed to change that.

This also meant we needed to move the Function App to a dedicated plan since Managed Identity is not supported with Consumption or Elastic Premium plans.

Allow Client Credentials Flow in ASP.NET & Microsoft.Identity.Web

For authenticating Entra ID users & services in ASP.NET you’re probably using the Microsoft.Identity.Web with some initialization code looking something like this in your Program.cs:

This will configure authentication based on the values stored in your appsettings’ “AzureAd” section. And it should work fine with “normal” users, but it will not accept Tokens from a Client Credentials Flow that might be used for Service-to-Service communications.

Service-to-Service comminucation with Refit & Client Credentials Flow for Entra ID

For a recent project I needed my ASP.NET Core backend service to talk to an external license server using the Entra ID Client Credentials Flow for authentication. For these scenarios I like using Refit to generate the required http client logic. And adding auth for Entra ID is pretty straight forward as well if you know which libraries to use.

Read request headers in Azure Functions v4 with Node

I often have to read information from request headers in Azure Functions. For example to get the User Object ID that made an authenticated call. This is a bit more tricky than just calling request.headers[‘x-ms-client-principal-id‘]. This is valid TypeScript but will always be undefined!

Microsoft Teams deep links without client selection

Microsoft Teams lets you create deep links to various elements like chats, channels, conversations or apps. Usually when clicking such a link the user is first asked to choose wether to proceed in the browser or open the link in the Microsoft Teams desktop app. While this makes sense in most sharing scenarios there are situtaions where you might want to force either of these two options as the person sharing the link.

Deploying OpenAI Models to Azure with Bicep

Deploying an Azure OpenAI Service with GPT Models is pretty straight forward. However, I ran into an issue where deploying two models at the same time resulted in the following error most of the time:

“Another operation is being performed on the parent resource ‘/subscriptions/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/openaibiceptest/providers/Microsoft.CognitiveServices/accounts/mlbiceptest’. Please try again later.”

Connect Azure Iot Central to Event Hubs with Managed Identity

To process data collected with an IoT Central instance it’s common to first send it to Azure Event Hubs. This makes the data available to a wide range of receivers like Microft Fabric or Azure Functions. Since we want to minimize the use of credentials here’s how to connect IoT Central with Event Hubs using Azure Managed Identities. Following this guide will also fix the “Unable to authenticate the user-provided event hub.” error.

Deploying over SFTP with Azure DevOps pipelines

I recently needed to deploy some files to a webserver over SFTP using Azure DevOps pipelines. Despite the name SFTP is not related to FTP or FTPS as its SSH-based, so the FtpUpload@2 task won’t work for us. What we’re actually looking for is the CopyFilesOverSSH task. Let’s see how to configure it properly.