Dotnet

I’ve been thinking about migrating one of my side projects from Azure Functions to the Dapr framework to make it more portable. One of the most important components of this architecture is the ability to refresh an authentication token that enables each Function app to retrieve data from an external API. In an Azure Functions architecture, we can use timer triggers to perform scheduled jobs simply. The issue here is that Functions have an opinionated programming model. While this does make integrations between components simple, this can lock us into the Azure Functions hosting model, limiting the portability that I’d like my architecture to achieve. ...

In distributed architectures, we’ll usually have a number of independent stateless services that serve a purpose (set around a domain, such as ordering items, storing items in a catalog, handling authentication etc.) While services should strive to be stateless, there will be some services that need to track state in order to fufil a business operation or function. Dapr has a state management build block that simplifies state tracking and enables you to store state across a variety of data stores. ...

Continuing my Microsoft Orleans learning journey, I decided to have a bit of a play around with one of their tutorials. When it comes to complex concepts or new frameworks, I like to get my hands dirty with the code to help me understand how the moving parts work together in action. In this blog post, I’ll be building my own version of the minimal Orleans app that tutorial builds and dissecting each part as I go along. Bear in mind that there are many ways to build an app, and this is just my preferred way of doing it. The idea is to break down the original tutorial and provide a bit more context as to what is going on. ...

I had a bit of spare time yesterday between customer meetings and wanted to do some coding. I’ve been hearing about Microsoft Orleans a lot on twitter and even found this Microsoft Learn module that shows you how to build your first Orleans app with ASP.NET Core 6.0. I’m a fan of distributed systems and frameworks, so I’ve wanted to get my head around Orleans for a while. For those of you who may not know, Orleans is a cross-platform framework that you can use to build distributed applications in .NET. These apps span more that just a single process using peer-to-peer communication. Orleans can scale from a single lonely on-prem server to globally distributed applications running in the cloud. It can run anywhere .NET can, including Linux, Windows and macOS. ...