I Did A Thing Anyone who knows me knows that I am a fairly large "tinkerer", as in, someone who spends a good amount time trying out new things, but eventually gets bored quickly and moves on. One of the things that I have always been a fan of is productivity enhancements, to coincide with my laziness. Due to this, I have created a fair amount of things, but never truly finished any personal project.

Frustrated by GitHub Insights As an owner of a handful of large public repos for my job, one of the things that I care about is knowing the traffic to the repos to get an understanding of visibility. GitHub has this amazing feature, called GitHub Insights, which allows you to see some of this data, however it is capped at a date range of 14 days in the past. I am not sure on the long-term goals of Insights, but if that cap stays, it will frustrate folks, some of them very well known folks.

So I Changed My DevOps As some may know, I already had a fully working CI/CD process for my blog and it was running on Azure Pipelines. As someone that is always learning and wanting to play with a new tool, I was pretty intrigued when GitHub Actions was formally announced at GitHub Universe. I wanted to see how challenging it would be to move my DevOps process from Azure Pipelines to GitHub Actions and it was not hard at all.

Starting with a Manual, Multi-Step Process I have [blogged](/post/building-blog) about the changes I made to streamline my site architecture and continue to work on ways to improve it. One thing that I did a month ago was replace the static page that was my [speaking page][/speaking] and make it more dynamic. Before whenever I had a new speaking gig, I would go into my repo and edit the HTML, EVERY... TIME.

Have You Tried Snapshot Debugger Yet? No? Why Not? If you don't know by now, I am a huge fan of [Snapshot Debugger](https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/app/snapshot-debugger), which if you are not aware is a tool that allows .NET developers to get better visibility into their remote applications. Snapshot Debugger is accessible via 2 locations, the Azure Portal (Product Name is Application Insights Snapshot Debugger), where you can see variables in your call stack like so.

I have updated my blog to use GitHub Actions for Ci/CD, check out this post to learn more! Why a Post on This? I have been asked a few times why I decided to build a blog and more importantly, what I did to build a blog that was lightweight, easy to modify (i.e. add posts) and most importantly, is cheap. This is how I approached it, and I understand that some people have more criteria when they look to create a blog, but I am a simple man with simple needs.

Intro This is one guide in a series of guides that can act as study material for Microsoft’s new Azure oriented certification exams. AZ-203 Exam Guide The AZ-400 exam, which is titled “Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions” and has a target audience of Azure DevOps Engineers. This exam was in beta for some time and was recently released proper in February 2019. Passing this exam is one requirement to earn the “Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer” certification, the other being an “Azure Administrator Associate” or “Azure Developer Associate”.

Have You Heard of CloudShell? Back in around the Build 2017 timeframe, the first implementation of [Azure CloudShell](https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/cloud-shell/overview) was rolled out, bringing the ability to run Azure CLI commands from the context of a logged in Azure session, from anywhere the Azure Portal could be loaded (i.e. a browser). This allowed you to do many things via the command line in the Azure world without having to use the GUI or have the tooling installed on your machine.

This is one guide in a series of guides that can act as study material for Microsoft's new Azure oriented certification exams. * [AZ-300 Exam Guide](/post/az-300-study-guide) * [AZ-301 Exam Guide](/post/az-301-study-guide) -- Update here, I passed this exam in January 2019 exclusively using this study guide. Let me know if you have any questions using the contact page. Intro As a Microsoft employee who works with customers and a cloud enthusiast, I see it essential to be knowledgeable of how the cloud can bring the best value to the developer.

Tis the Season I am humble to be a part of the [2nd Annual C# Advent Calendar](https://crosscuttingconcerns.com/The-Second-Annual-C-Advent ). Thank you to everyone who helped put it together and contributed. My blog post is hopefully a fun one not to be taken too seriously. I have been a developer for over 10 years, and I am always looking at new ways to be more productive. May I present you with 6 tips that I have started to adopt that I think have increased my developer skills 1000% (YMMV).

An Easy Solution for an Easy Task I write about Azure Functions over and over again because they are the perfect solution for what I am trying to do, small little things that I don’t want to spin up a larger unnecessary app to do it. That along with the fact they just run and go away, the price point for the things I do make it basically free. I recently remapped my blog to a static website hosted in Azure Blob Storage.

Did you know the Azure CLI was Extendable? I did not know this. I was minding my business, when I decided to catch up on some Azure Friday videos, and found this beauty from June 23rd 2018 regarding extending the Azure CLI and how it was completely in the open. In the video one of the extensions was showcased, alias, which allows a developer to create quick commands for Azure CLI commands.

New Version of Azure Media Services I have been a fan of Azure Media Services for a long time. I worked with a customer roll it our to their organization a few years back and immediately saw the opportunity to enable a company with the ability to wholly own their video content and host/play the media inside their organization. Previously, the SDK that interfaced with Azure Media Services, consisted of 2 External Packages

Extending the Greatness of Application Insights I will start off by saying I love Application Insights. I have been using it for a long time, and am delighted at the new roll-out of features for it. I have even been giving a talk on Application Insights and how easy it is to instrument your application, so check that out if you are interested. One thing that is great about Application Insights is how extendable it is.

Dot Net Standard Support in Azure Functions! I have talked about Azure Functions before, but up until this point, I felt like it was limited to cases where you needed to interact with a database. One prime example being listening on an Ftp folder and tracking the files in a database. You would do this in the past don’t get me wrong, but I wanted to use the newest stuff with the newest stuff, and using an older mechanism to interact with a database with something as cool as Azure Functions bummed me out.

Being Repitive is not fun Ever since I can remember I have loved to automate things. Whether it was taking toys and mounting them on remote control car parts or convincing my brother that the show I wanted to watch at a particular time was far better than anything he wanted to watch. I guess those things aren’t really automation rather more like a combination of laziness and and ability to make a little effort so something wasn’t as contrived the next time… WAIT, ISN’T THAT AUTOMATION?