Implementing Custom Feature flags - Your own logic to shutoff a feature - Azure App Configuration

This is a continuation from the previous article on feature flags implemented using Azure App configuration service to maintain the flags. Just to reiterate, feature management can be implemented using config files but this article is trying to implement feature flags connecting to Azure App configuration service. Introduction The previous article described about implementing a boolean feature flag to turn on/off a feature. In this article I am trying to implement a custom feature flag. Microsoft provides few predefined custom feature flags or feature filters (as they are called) Targeting, TimeWindow, and Percentage (more about it here), which covers most usecases, however, there might be situations where you find the predefined ones falling short. In this article I am building a filter ground up with a made up custom logic. ...

June 22, 2021 · 4 min · 666 words · Me

Implementing Feature flags using azure

Feature flag is a very popular practice in modern application development, which is used to specifically hide features implemented that are not yet ready to be used by wider audience, and when ready can be enabled by a flip of a switch. The flags can also be used as a kill switch for application feature when it not working as expected. With feature flags implemented, it would be effective to have the features enabled or disabled from a location outside of the application infrastructure or configuration, this way we can have features spanning across applications be controlled via a centralized flag. Azure has feature management as part of the Azure App configuration service which can manage feature flags and maintain it separate from your hosting model and will act as a centralized repository for feature flags. Microsoft also provides libraries for different programing languages to consume Azure App Configuration service. More about it can be found here ...

May 16, 2021 · 5 min · 922 words · Me

Radio Player using Blazor 5

I have been reading the Blazor 5 documentation and decided to create a simple project to give its features a try. As always, there were a ton of ideas in my mind but while scanning through dev.to i came across a post by Aleks Popovic, where he made a Radio player using react, so i decided to create one using Blazor 5. I used the same service as Aleks to get the radio stations, called the Radio-Browser. ...

May 11, 2021 · 3 min · 582 words · Me

Switch off auto formatting in Visual Studio 2019

If you have landed here searching how to switch off auto formatting of code files in Visual Studio, you are either a code purist who does not like the formatting the IDE is performing or you are like me editing a large auto-generated class file (due to unfortunate situations) and Visual studio hangs or crashes on you every time you do a small change. The good news is there is an option in the IDE to switch feature off. Through out the generations of visual studio this option may have moved between sections, but fortunately been called the same. The flag you are looking for is ...

February 17, 2021 · 1 min · 122 words · Me

Deploy Pihole on RaspberryPi ZeroW to adblock your home network

Problem We all have seen and annoyed seeing those google ads or facebook ads on websites and apps. Mostly of the times the ads over takes the actual content of the website, especially on those forums. Ads also shows up on free email services, apps on your phones, smart tv, they are everywhere. More than annoyance, they eat up a lot of bandwidth and ofter makes the website/apps slower to respond. There are ad blockers available for your browsers, but that just solves the problem on that device, but devices like smart tv doesn’t have an easy way to block ad on the device. ...

February 10, 2021 · 4 min · 849 words · Me

Migrated my blog out of Blogger

Problem While blogger is an amazing platform for hosting your blog, with perks of easy linking custom domains and google analytics integration, the main issue is with styling/rendering of your website and most of all blogger “owns” the content and if its decides it can just take it out or make parts paid. I had bitter experience with another hosting platform, where my account was in-accessible and had to spend hours writing to customer support with little support from them . So decided to make the big move. ...

February 10, 2021 · 4 min · 742 words · Me

Infrastructure as C#

Introduction After attempting the .Net tutorial on deploying a simple WebAPI based microservice to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), wanted a better way to represent my infrastructure than the YAML.xml file. This was partly because of me being novice in YAML format and partly to have a way to abstract the infrastructure in order to make it repeatable and it should be not just confined to AKS. The first solution to this problem was to use a framework like Terraform to define my infrastructure as code. But this will lead me learn new language and language constructs like loops, conditions etc. The search was over pretty soon after I found a framework called Pulumi, that lets me write my infrastructure in many of the populate programming language including C#. So i decided to convert the .Net tutorial YAML into a pulumi project and see how well it runs. ...

July 26, 2020 · 3 min · 557 words · Me