Developer Day 2019
This article was originally published 26th November 2019 on Linkedin
Developer Day is the UK's premier free developer conference held at Microsoft's UK HQ in Reading with many people attending from all parts of the UK and I was lucky enough to be sent by tombola and have my own talk selected. There were many people and sessions to learn from, these were the ones I attended at Developer Day 2019 on 12th October 2019
Blazor : The future of front end is here - Chris Sainty
Chris Sainty talked about Blazor which is a front-end single-page application framework, the brainchild of Steve Sanderson, which uses Razor from ASP.NET MVC, HTML and CSS and works in all modern browsers, including mobile.
What do you get with Blazor?
Blazor allows you to create forms with validation, share code, perform authentication, leverage server-side rendering, support dependency injection, perform interop with JavaScript, support component libraries such as Razor class libraries and use many .NET Standard 2.0 NuGet packages. Blazor separates how changes are calculated from how they're applied, by including a browser renderer that can update the browser DOM, which is built to be extensible and can even run independently.
Blazor Webassembly
Is based on WebAssembly, the byte-code format web standard supported in all major browsers - including mobile, offers near native performance of .NET code to run client-side within a web browser using the Mono .NET runtime. Applications are not compiled to WebAssembly but are just-in-time interpreted by the runtime and are just static files so you can host your application anywhere such as GitHub pages. The runtime only needs to be downloaded once as it will be cached by the browser and you can even run your application offline or distribute as a Progressive Web Application but are limited by the browser sandbox. Blazor WebAssembly is in preview and will be available in May 2020.
Blazor Server
There's no WebAssembly as applications run on the server with everything that is possible to do in .NET Core available to your application. There is a client-side script to manage communication between the client and the server using a SignalR connection. Client-side events will be transferred using this to the server and will perform any action need then any information is then sent back to the client using a render batch which will only send the necessary changes to the client. Blazor Server is available now.
Spotify for Developers - Peter Bull
I talked about Spotify for Developers, which was my first full presentation at a major event. I have experience with music services as a developer having worked with Zune from Microsoft and created my own Zune Social application for Windows Phone 7 back in 2010 which got over 330,000 downloads. I've used Xbox Music which became Groove Music to bring back the core features of that original app and made the transition to Spotify with Spotify for Developers.
developer.spotify.com
developer.spotify.com is where to find out more about using Spotify as a developer, try out API calls with the online Web API console and more. The dashboard is where you can create and manage Spotify integrations, create a Client Id and Secret to use with the Spotify API and Edit Settings to set the Redirect URI for authentication.
Authorisation Guide
You can authorise an application to get data or to allow a user to approve your application to access their Spotify data, this can be controlled with Authorisation Scopes for Listening History, Library, Playlists, User Information, Spotify Connect, Playback - for iOS, Android and Web Playback SDKs and Follow.
- Authorisation Code Flow can be used for long running applications where a user grants permission just once and provides a token that can be refreshed - with a request to the accounts service where the user can authorise access followed by any requests to the API to return requested data or new access tokens.
- Implicit Grant Flow is for clients that are implemented such as those using JavaScript and run in a web browser - with a request to the account service where the user can log in and authorise access passing across a short-lived token followed by any requests to the API to return requested data.
- Client Credentials Flow is used in server-to-server authentication however only endpoints that do not access user information may be accessed - with a request to obtain a token followed by any requests to the API to return requested data.
Spotify Web API
Spotify Web API App Authorisation is where you authorise an application to access the Spotify platform and can retrieve data from the following endpoints of Search, Browse, Playlists, Artists, Albums and Tracks. Get All New Releases is where you can get the New Releases as shown in the Browse tab of Spotify by just providing Client Credentials Flow token and some parameters.
Spotify Web API User Authorisation is where as well as authorisation the user you grant your application permission to access or modify their data on Spotify and you can retrieve data from the following endpoints of Follow, Playlists, Library, Player, Personalisation and User Profile. Get User's Followed Artists is where you can get Followed Artists as shown in the Artists section of Your Library of Spotify by providing an Authorisation Code Flow or Implicit Grant Flow token and some parameters.
Spotify SDKs
- Web Playback SDK is a client-side JavaScript library allowing you to create a new player in Spotify Connect and play any audio track from Spotify in a web browser.
- Spotify iOS SDK allows access to the Spotify API, play tracks using the Spotify App and respond to playback state.
- Spotify Android SDK allows access to the Spotify API, play tracks using the Spotify App and subscribe to player state.
- Spotify.NetStandard is my own Spotify SDK available on NuGet and can be used with any .NET Standard 2.0 compatible runtime such as .NET Core and Xamarin with full source code, unit tests and documentation.
Internationalising your applications - Pete Vickers
Pete Vickers talked about internationalising applications, which allows an application to be more attractive to non-native English speakers by using resource files to display everything that needs to be shown on screen in different languages.
Microsoft Multilingual App Toolkit
Microsoft Multilingual App Toolkit is a Visual Studio Plugin and can be used to translate up to two million characters to month using automatic translation powered by Bing Translator then export these files for manual translation. Any newly added translations can be reviewed from generated ELF files from a source RESX file using the Multilingual Editor allowing a native speaker to easily look at the original English, machine translated version and comments to correct and finalise any translations, and can even support right-to-left languages such as Arabic correctly. You can then load these translations back into Visual Studio easily and generate the relevant resources that can be used by your application, it is also possible to use applications such as Excel to do any reviewing of translations but using the Multilingual Editor is easier.
Microsoft Azure IoT Hubs with Raspberry Pi and Node.js - Peter Gallagher
Peter Gallagher talked about Microsoft Azure IoT Hubs using a Raspberry Pi and Node.js. Software needed includes Visual Studio Code, SSH client, a web browser and an Azure Subscription. Hardware needed includes Raspberry Pi B+ upwards with Node.js 6.0, plus a few wires, a breadboard, Raspberry Pi GPIO with board numbering, wiring Pi numbering or BCM numbering plus have some LEDS and sensors - you can even check the wiring is working by flashing an LED.
What is an Azure IoT hub?
Is like a switchboard for IoT messaging and provides device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device messaging using a variety of endpoints using any message queue technology, you can create a free IoT hub on Azure where you can send up to 8,000 messages of 0.5KB. Based on event hubs but allows for two-way communications and allows for a million simultaneous connections, you can store a registry of each IoT device, support device “twin” functionality and libraries you can take advantage of in .NET, JavaScript and Node.js and send messages back and forth from Azure to an IoT device.
What are Service Bus and Logic Apps?
Service Bus is an enterprise scale messaging broker which decouples services and apps used for async data transfer, you can use either Queues (FIFO) for a single recipient or Pub/Sub with topics for multiple recipients. Logic Apps provide a graphical user interface to hook together a bunch of applications, services and workflow easily in Azure.
.NET Configuration is Easy ... Right? - Steve Collins
Steve Collins talked about introducing the complexity of configuration to new developers and food-for-thought for existing developers. Configurations is for values that don't want to hard code, may change in the future, sensitive values in source code and values that may enable or disable functionality.
.NET Framework - web.config
web.config has a very rigid schema, easy to get wrong, not very extensible without a lot of work, requires transforms for different environments, very hard to unit test and requires a lot more code to do more than just simple handling of settings. There is also the risk of configuration drift between servers if not controlling this though automated deployments, plus usually only read when the application starts so any changes require an app restart, they can become large an unwieldy to manage in a single file, plus you can have hard-to-find errors in the configuration or even leak secrets into source control.
.NET Core - web.config is no more!
web.config and configuration manager is not in .NET Code by default, configuration is not limited to files as you could use any source of settings, applications don't need to be restarted to use changed config values and can have sources of different types including JSON, INI or even XML. You can also pass in settings with environment variables, key per file with Docker Secrets, User Secrets and even take advantage of secure configuration providers such as Azure Key Vault or AWS Key Management Services.
Configuration Sources and Providers
A config source is how the settings are actually read in a specified format and this is what a provider is generate from, what you end up with is a hierarchical structure of key value pairs, that can be compounded into colon-delimited strings to read them. You can also have a layered approach such as configuration for different environments like production and development. It is possible to write your own configuration source using technologies like gRPC, GraphQL or even a REST API.
Configuration with Binding
You shouldn't use the IConfiguration interface the same way as configuration manager as if you use magic strings these are still vulnerable to typos, however you could encapsulate your settings with a class. You can map a configuration section to a class instance and listen to changes in the underlying configuration with dependency injection using the options pattern, this registers three generic interfaces dependant on the scope options, IOptions<T> - a singleton when the application loaded, IOptionsMonitor<T> - latest value and IOptionsSnapshot<T> - for a scoped lifetime.
Protect Settings
You should be protecting any secrets in the configuration but don't roll your own encryption or use Base-64 encoding or use the Data Protection APIs - these have their keys rotated every ninety days. You should instead use a strong algorithm such as AES256 with a SHA2 hashed key, but don't store the Key/IV pairs in source control but consider putting these in an environment variable and use different salt/hashes for different purposes if you have multiple encrypted values. You should create an interface for decryption keys where you can pass in an algorithm so this can easily be changed later and could validate your configuration values with Data Annotations.