Processing Google reCaptcha Tokens in ASP.NET Core

Integrating a simple test to help prevent malignant input on your site is as simple as integrating a few lines of code into your website.

Now, if I could I’d pinch myself to make sure I’m not a robot, but I know very well that if I’m smart enough to think of that, they must have also programmed a sense of touch and pain into me as well. So testing to see if a website user is going to be even more daunting, because we can’t even pinch them.

Thankfully, the reCaptcha service offered by Google is free add-on to your site that will help to avoid bad data getting into your site, prevent malicious users from gaining access to your resources, and helping you to avoid unwanted side effects of bots that pile up junk data through your forms.

Read on to see how to get this all wired up in a Razor Pages application in ASP.NET Core. Heck, if you are in an MVC app or are building a Web API (or Azure Function) this would all still serve useful!

Scaling Azure Functions from Consumption Plan to Premium Plan (and back again)

In this post, we use the az cli to move an Azure Function app from a Consumption Plan to a Premium Plan (and back again).

Deploying a Static Site to Azure Using the az CLI

The az command line interface (cli) is a powerful tool for creating, modifying and deploying to Azure resources. Since it's a cli AND cross platform, it's also a great tool for automating your deployments. In this post, we'll use the az cli to deploy a static site to Azure.

Enhancing Application Insights Request Telemetry

A continuation in my series of love letters about Application Insights. Today I explore a method of enhancing the request telemetry that is automatically collected by the Application Insights SDK.

Setting Cloud Role Name in Application Insights

A continuation in my series of love letters about Application Insights. Today I dig into the importance of setting cloud role name.

Getting the Most Out of Application Insights for .NET (Core) Apps

If you've worked with me in the last couple years, you know that I've fallen in love with Application Insights. This is the first in a series of posts designed to help you get the most out of Application Insights for .NET Core applications.

Azure Camp 2019

Simon is running the 2019 Azure camp for Calgary and this post is all about it.

Using NodaTime with Dapper

After my recent misadventures attempting to use Noda Time with Entity Framework Core, I decided to see what it would take to use Dapper in a the same scenario.

Using Noda Time with Entity Framework Core

Noda Time is a fantastic date/time library for .NET. I started using it recently and it really simplified the logic around handling dates. Unfortunately, I ran in to some problems with using Noda Time together with Entity Framework Core.

Optimistic Concurrency Tracking with Dapper and SQL Server

This is a part of a series of blog posts on data access with Dapper. In today's post, we explore optimistic checks to ensure 2 users can't accidentally overwrite each other's updates to a particular row of data.