Latest Happenings as of June 2021

 Azure B2C

• Azure B2C is an Identity provider used by businesses to manage their customer accounts.  I've been using this at work now and having some fun learning some new tech.

Azure App Service Certificates

• For a long time now SSL certificates have been available for free from LetsEncrypt.  Now they're free from Azure as well.  As of May 25, 2021 Azure App Managed Certificates are Generally Available.  I'm not using these for a variety of services and have used them to bind my applications to both custom domain names as wells as Azure host names for Traffic Manager.

Tools

• Medelio: a free open-sourced UML and BPMN modeling tool.  
• Stoplight Studio: Open API modeling tool. 

Finds:

• API Intersection Podcast: hosted by the folks at Stoplight, this podcast dives into best practices around API design.  It's fairly new and seems to include new episodes every Thursday.  Perfect for my summer lunch jogs.

How to Link a Custom Domain to My Okta Tenant

 I have a developer tenant in Okta and would like to add a custom domain.  This should be possible, all I need is a few things:

1. A Developer Okta tenant
2. My own custom domain
3. A certificate, which I will get by using Lets Encrypt

Error retrieving certificates from Azure Key Vault

When retrieving certificates from Azure Key Vault I get the following error in my .NET Core 3.1 app service.  The file is read from the Key Vault just fine, but throws an exception when converting the secret to a x509 certificate:

Internal.Cryptography.CryptoThrowHelper+WindowsCryptographicException at Internal.Cryptography.Pal.StorePal.FromBlobOrFile

VERY Slow Windows 10 Right Click

For a while now whenever I R-click in my Windows 10 File Explorer the system hangs for about 10 seconds and then finally responds.  I've cleaned out a few of the programs that show up in the context menu, but no luck.  I just found this article, which sounds promising.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/fix-for-very-slow-or-hang-when-right-click-on-a-file-or-folder/

Awesome!! This worked.  Following these steps and running ShellXView to see the context menu programs was VERY eye opening.  There are about 40 programs using the context menu.  In my case it was TortoiseGit that was slowing me down.  Once I realized that it was the culprit, I uninstalled it (since I no longer need it) and now my life is 1000% times better.  R-click is lightning fast again. 

Azure ARM Template Error Deploying Certificate From Key Vault: The parameter certificateEnvelope.Properties.KeyVaultId has an invalid value.

I've been deploying an App Service along with an SSL certificate that's stored in a Key Vault.  After renaming the Key Vault, I've been getting the following error when deploying the SSL certificate to my App Service via an ARM Template.

"The parameter certificateEnvelope.Properties.KeyVaultId has an invalid value." 

"Message": "The parameter certificateEnvelope.Properties.KeyVaultId has an invalid value."

To get this fixed, I had to delete the App Service, which I think fixed the problem because it removed the certificate that was deployed from the original Key Vault altogether from Azure.

Here's the article that helped solve my issue:

https://peter.orneholm.com/post/155342103823/using-azure-key-vault-with-azure-web-apps-the

C# / .NET - The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document

I recently couldn't figure out why my breakpoints weren't working in a sample project that I downloaded from GitHub.  When I'd hover over my breakpoints, I'd see the following message:

The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document

Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.Data.Entity.Build.Tasks.dll or one of its dependencies

I created a new project in Visual Studio 2015 and when I attempted to build, received the following error:

The "EntityClean" task could not be loaded from the assembly c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Data.Entity.Build.Tasks.dll.
Could not load file or assembly 'file:///c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Data.Entity.Build.Tasks.dll' or one of its dependencies