How To Create The Next Youtube or Twitch using Blazor, .NET 5, and Microsoft Azure - Part I

 

There are countless types of solutions you can create when developing software.
Today, we will see a small introduction on how to create your very own Video Sharing Portal,
with Blazor, .NET 5, and Microsoft Azure.

The Architecture

Before starting to code any project, it is vital to have an understanding of the architectural components required by the system and how all of the pieces will interact.

The diagram displayed here is just one of the many ways in which you can implement Video Sharing Portals, there is no right or wrong architecture, since it ultimately depends on your own specific needs and business strategy, however, there are best practices, you can learn of those in the Azure Architecture Center, take a special look to the Reference Architectures section.

Our diagrams are the proposed solution for the Open Source Project FairPlayTube, which has the following items:

• Users
• Azure Web CDN
• Used to speed up load times.
• Blazor WebAssembly Client App
• .NET 5 Server API
• Azure Blob Storage
• Used to store users uploaded videos
• Azure SQL Database
• Use to store users and videos-related data, while enforcing Data Integrity.
• Power BI
• Used to visualize Error Logs from Desktop and Mobile App
• Azure AD B2C
• Used to allow secure and centralized users authentication
• .NET 5 Background Jobs
• Used to monitor the videos indexing progress and update data accordingly.
• Azure SignalR
• Used to notify users when their videos have been indexed, as well as when they have received new messages from other users.
• Azure Speech
• Used as an accessibility helper, to allow users to hear an audio representation of the content in the page.
• Azure Video Analyzer (formerly Azure Video Indexer)
• Used to analyze videos and generator insights
• Azure Personalizer
• Used to show the best content for the users
• Azure Translator
• Used to automatically translate the text-data to multiple languages
• Azure Cognitive Search
• Used to allow for high quality fast search of videos

You can find the repo here: FairPlayTube Repository

There you can check the Readme and the Wiki.

Here you can see a small sample of the development progress

Optimize your new Developers Onboarding process with Microsoft Azure

A common scenario in Software Development Onboarding process, is that the developers need to configured their environment, usually from scratch.

Depending on the system's complexity and network connection speeds, these setups can take more than a day, even a whole week in exceptional cases, meaning the new resources will not be productive immediately.

In today's world, immediate productivity is a must, therefore, as company owners, 
we must do what is within our reach to make new resources be productive as soon as possible,
here is where Microsoft Azure comes to play.

Microsoft Azure has a vast quantity of services for all of your needs, one of those is
Shared Image Galleries.

With Shared Images Galleries, you can pre-configure Development Environments Virtual Machines and every time you hire a new Software Developer, you just create a new VM based on those already
pre-configured VM Image Definitions.

Check more here:

• Create an Azure Shared Image Gallery using the portal
• Shared Image Galleries overview

Would you like to know more about Microsoft Azure?
Feel free to contact me through Upwork or LinkedIn

Introduction to #Microsoft #Azure Functions and @Azure Durable Functions

How to Convert Your Text To Speech With Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure gives you a lot of possibilities, among them,
it allows you to use Cognitive Services in order to convert your text to speech,

which is extremely useful when creating GPS enabled applications, 
web applications with accesibility features, MOOC(Massive Open Online Courses),

videogames characters dialogs when you have no voice actors, and more.

Watch the following videos to learn how to use Microsoft's Azure Speech APIs

Marketing Automation Tips

Marketing Automation is extremely useful if not vital, not only for businesses but for every person with the need to create prescence and grow audiences in the Internet.

There are many tools for Marketing Automation, today I would like to show you a small example of how to take advantage of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps to do some Marketing Automation in your Social Media Channels, in this case Twitter.

6 Books Every .NET Software Developer must have

.NET Core has been growing up fast, and every day more people are taking advantage of it, while .NET Core has many similarities to .NET Framework, it has many new features and some ways to solve tasks have changed.

Below you will find a list of books which would help you polish your .NET Core Skills

Programming ASP.NET Core (Developer Reference) 1st Edition

This books is a complete guide to .NET Core and many of the features and components surrounding it.  You will learn: .NET Core, Entity Framework Core, ASP .NET Identity in .NET Core, Dependency Injection, using middleware, and more.

Modern API Design with ASP.NET Core 2: Building Cross-Platform Back-End SystemsProfessional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 7th Edition

While most of the times not visible to the main users of a system, back-ends are a vital part of most systems. Nowadays, it is very important to have the same applications accessible from many platforms (Web, Mobile, Windows, etc), while having the same back-end, this can be easily achieved by exposing your shared functionality as Web APIs.

.NET Core 2.0 By Example: Learn to program in C# and .NET Core by building a series of practical, cross-platform projects

One of the best ways to learn is through examples. You will find a step by step guide from the installation of the required tools up to the implementation of applications running in .NET Core.

C# 7 and .NET: Designing Modern Cross-platform Applications: The Open Source revolution of .NET Core

As time passes and technologies evolve, the way to develop applications also change. Nowadays, it is required to create high-quality modern applications, which are cross-platform and many times open sourced. With this book you will learn the basis for .NET Core based moden web applications and microservices.

Enterprise Application Architecture with .NET Core: An architectural journey into the Microsoft .NET open source platform

Design and Development of Enterprise Applications is more than just coding, it is a set of steps involving methodologies, best-practices and tools to manage the systems lifecycles from its inception up to the release to production and maintenance.

With this book you will learn about DevOps, Agile, basics for enterprise level architectures, distributed computing, microservices, cloud-specific architectures, and even some market trends.

C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 High Performance: Build highly performant, multi-threaded, and concurrent applications using C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0

Modern applications require to respond very quickly and efficiently, though also many times these systems have the need to perform long-running tasks, which, if not designed correctly, can create bottlenecks and heavily reduce the system performance. With this book, you will learn to design and implement highly performance systems by using such as multithreading and microservices.

One more of the many ways to integrate #Azure, #SharePoint Online and #PowerBI

Microsoft Azure allows you to create many different and interesting solutions to solve your business needs.
In this video we show you how you can integrate Microsoft Azure, SharePoint Online and Power BI to verify the health of a list of websites stored in an excel file hosted in your SharePoint Online library.

Click on the image to see more

Integrating Microsoft Azure, SharePoint Online and Power BI to check websites status

ASP .NET 5 and Reporting Services: How to?

ASP .Net 5 is a big change in the way developers create applications, many APIs are new, many others are still not compatible so it forces developers to look for workarounds on their traditional implementations.

There has been a lot of discussion about integrating Reporting Services with MVC 6.

The traditional approach to generate reports using Reporting Services is to use the Report Execution Service which comes as part of SSRS(SQL Server Reporting Services), in a traditional ASP .NET application you just create a reference to the web service and you get a generated proxy client, which you can use to generate reports through code.

In ASP .NET 5 you don't get the "Add Web Reference" nor "Add Service Reference" menu items, if you try to add a reference to another project which is not a package type project you get an error message.



One way to overcome this kind of issues is to use an Azure WebJobs and Queues.

First we create a storage account, in this case I named it "ptireportsstg".



Then, on a MVC Controller that will generate reports I connect to the Storage Account and to a queue named "reportsrequestqueue", if the queue does not exist, I create it.



Then in the View of the Report I want to generate I set the parameters and proceed to create the report generation request.



Then the post action starts executing and it has the passed model filled with the parameters set before in the form.
This action creates a CloudQueueMessage based on the model received.



Once the WebJob received the cloud message it starts processing it.



The LoadReport method is the common implementation which generated the report's bytes so we are not showing it, once we have all that we proceed  to save information about the generated report and to persist the report as an Azure Cloud File.



We save the generated report info along with its cloud file url in a table named ReportHistory.



Once we have that we can go to the list of reports, which read the information from the database.



Now we click on Download Report and it will proceed to read the Cloud File and download it.

We open the file and we have the expected contents.



Do you know of other solutions? Please feel free to share them in the comments and don't forget to

Visit Our Website

Get To Know Your #Network with @Microsoft #Azure and #Office365

Getting to know your followers is very important, even more if you are running a business.
But where do you start, let's say you have 2000 followers.
You could start conversation with them 1 by 1, but if you are a small company where luxury of time is not an option, it could be very inefficient.

Image by Zigomitros Athanasios - Thor4bp on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network.png

Instead, you could scan your network profiles and based on their profile descriptions identify which have certain keywords you may be interested in, and maybe even their location.

Once you have this data, you can segment and check which sector has the biggest list of users.
With programming skills and cloud-based technologies such as Microsoft Azure you can do this easily.

Azure is the Microsoft response for Cloud Solutions, leveraging it's power gives you endless possibilities, and here is an example.

In Microsoft Azure you can create what is called Worker Roles, it's basically a virtual machine running background tasks (similar to Windows Services).

What do you do with it? Depends on what you need, but here is a simple example.

Let's say you want to identify which Twitter users are constantly following and unfollowing you, you can then use the Twitter API to check your current followers, store that information into a database hosted in Microsoft Azure, this information you can use it to identify if these stored users are still following you days later.

You can go even further and use it to get to know your network.
Let's say you store your followers list and their followers list(username and profile description)

Once you have done that you can create custom queries with specific filters and turn them into database views.

Try Microsoft Office 365 Today for FREE

Once the views are created you can use Power BI to create reports retrieving the data you want

Then you can schedule the Power BI reports to refresh daily at 6am, to have some updated data by the time people arrive at the office.

To create even more complex and customized reports, you could leverage the power of SQL Server Reporting Services, hosted in a virtual machine running on Microsoft Azure, create report templates published to a URL your team is able to access.
For example a report that gets a list of users and categorize them based on keywords found in ther profile (education, games, marketing, etc)

Or you can create a report requesting the user for a keyword

You can go even further and create subscriptions to reports you know you will need frequently, select how often you need those reports, and the file format and time of the day you want them.
Once you set that you could have for example a report for the keyword "marketing" every day at 9pm sent to your email.

Feel free to comment on the post.

If you want to know more about the potential of Microsoft Azure, Web Roles, Office 365, Reporting Services or other, feel free to contact us from our website or send an email to services@pticostarica.com

Cree su propio servidor de Moodle en cuestión de minutos

Hoy día la facilidad que nos brindan los servicios en la nube incrementa exponencialmente las posibilidades.


Moodle es un Ambiente Educativo Virtual y un sistema de gestión de cursos que ayuda a facilitar el proceso de aprendizaje.

Gracias a los servicios de Microsoft Azure, podemos crear un servidor de Moodle en cuestión de minutos.

Basta con crear una máquina virtual a partir de las plantillas de Moodle en el VM Depot.



En el siguiente video puede ver un ejemplo del proceso de creación de un servidor de Moodle en Microsoft Azure

Para obtener más información contáctenos

Notificación de errores utilizando servicios en la nube

¿Sabía usted que puede aprovechar las ventajas de los servicios en la nube para crear servicios de notificación de errors críticos?

En todo sistema informático es común que existan errores inesperados,

por eso es vital que todo sistema almacene información de estos errores cuando ocurren.

Image made by sv:Användare:Chrizz retrieved from Wikipedia

Una de las técnicas más utilizadas a la hora de que pasen estos errores inesperados, es almacenar toda la información posible en una base de datos: mensaje de error, hora y fecha exacta, dispositivo en el que sucedió, y en que lugar de la aplicación ocurrió el error.

Con Microsoft Azure puede aprovechar los Worker Role para crear servicios que se encuentren constantemente verificando si hay nuevos errores y enviar una notificación de esos errores a algún administrador. Para no generar spam pero detectar errores críticos a tiempo podría configurar reglas como solo enviar las notificaciones si hay más de 100 errores en una hora por ejemplo.



En el siguiente video podrá ver un ejemplo de cómo crear Worker Roles en Visual Studio,
uno es rol de prueba para crear tuplas de errores en la base de datos, de manera que exista información, el otro rol se encarga de buscar cuales errores existen en la base de datos que no se encuentren aún procesados, y finalmente procede a enviar un correo electrónico con el detalle de esos errores.

La ventaja de utilizar Worker Roles, es que se pueden publicar en Microsoft Azure, donde se ejecutarán automáticamente una vez que han sido publicados.

Para mayor información acerca de los servicios en la nube contáctenos

¿Por qué usar Microsoft Azure?

Sam Johnston - Created by Sam Johnston using OmniGroup's OmniGraffle and Inkscape (includes Computer.svg by Sasa Stefanovic) This vector image was created with Inkscape.

Primero que nada, ¿qué es Microsoft Azure?, de acuerdo con la descripción en su sitio
"Azure es la plataforma de informática en la nube de Microsoft, una colección cada vez mayor de servicios integrados (análisis, proceso, bases de datos, móviles, redes, almacenamiento y web) para moverse con más rapidez, llegar más lejos y ahorrar dinero".

¿Qué significa esto?
Significa que utilizando Azure podemos utilizar más de 240 servicios a través de internet, para aumentar nuestra productividad, disminuir costos en infraestructura, mantenimiento, personal, entre otros.


¿Quienes utilizan Azure?
Entre algunas de las empresas que utilizan Azure y que son bastante conocidas se encuentran: Pearson, Xerox, 3M, GE Healthcare, y Heineken.
Para ver toda la información acerca de cómo lo utilizan visite el sitio de Casos Prácticos, se recomienda ver la diferentes versiones ya que cambia según el idioma en el que se muestre, el cual se puede cambiar desde el final de la página.

¿Pero, qué servicios me brinda?

• Servicios de aplicaciones: permite crear aplicaciones móviles y aplicaciones web multiplataforma, con C#, HTML5, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Python, entre otros. Puede probar de manera gratuita aquí. Azure también le permite crear aplicaciones web rápidas desde una galería, entre las cuales se encuentran Drupal, Better CMS, WordPress, Joomla!, DNN Platform y más.
• Azure Web Apps – Try it and web development will never be the same
• Base de datos SQL: Puede crear sus bases de datos relacionales en la nube con escalabilidad inmediata, respaldos automáticos, y disponibilidad ininterrumpida.
• Azure SQL Database - create DBs in seconds
• Máquinas virtuales: Puede crear máquinas virtuales en la nube, y configurar según sus necesidades, además puede seleccionar de una galería de imágenes con sistema operativo y/o software preinstalado. Le permite también configurar equilibrios de carga con sus máquinas virtuales, y las puede dejar apagadas y encenderlas solamente cuando las necesite, reduciendo así el costo por su uso.
• How to Use Windows Azure Virtual Machine | How to Setup Windows Azure Virtual Machine
• Active Directory de Azure(Azure AD): Permite crear usuarios bajo un dominio aprobado, asignar roles y acceso a aplicaciones, además se puede integrar con Facebook, Twitter, Office 365, Salesforce, entre otros.
• Cloud Identity: Microsoft Azure Active Directory Explained
• Application Insights para Visual Studio: Le permite monitorear el comportamiento y disponibilidad de sus aplicaciones, sin incurrir en a necesidad de crear un complejo sistema de monitoreo para las mismas.
• Copia de Seguridad de Azure: Con Azure puede realizar copias de seguridad de sus datos, cifrados y con replicación geográfica, de manera que si borra datos accidentalmente o un servidor de producción falla, pueda recuperar los datos.
• Servicios multimedia: Permite crear soluciones multimedia para capacitaciones, publicidad, además de difusión de eventos en tiempo real, y poder verlos desde cualquier dispositivo como tablets y teléfonos móviles.
• Azure Media Services 101 - Get your video online now!

Estos son solo algunos de los servicios que ofrece Microsoft Azure, para ver una lista completa la puede ver acá

Si desea saber más de Microsoft Azure, o crear soluciones para sus necesidades, puede contactarnos a services@pticostarica.com