Function Names in the Wild

Whenever I see examples or implementations of Azure Functions I always see this:

[FunctionName("myfunction")]

Where the function name is present as a direct string literal. I’m not questioning that it is a string because that’s simply the way the FunctionName attribute works currently. I’m more concerned how the string got there.

I’d like to show two ways to refer to function names in a safe and consistent way. This is especially useful when you’re using Durable Functions and need to refer to activity function names in your orchestration function.

The Function Chaining Pattern

This is the third part of the Durable Functions series. In this video I’ll talk about the function chaining pattern which can be used to create function workflows.

Here’s the video, please give it a thumbs up if you like it and subscribe to my channel so you’ll be notified of new videos.

Resources

The source code that is used for this demo can be found on GitHub.

Eternal orchestrations & external events

This is the second part of the Durable Functions series. In this video I’ll talk about eternal function orchestrations and external events.

Here’s the video, please give it a thumbs up if you like it and subscribe to my channel so you’ll be notified of new videos.

Resources

The source code that is used for this demo can be found on GitHub.

Guidelines for Function Apps

Earlier today I read a tweet where a developer wasn’t sure when to group several Azure Functions in one Function App. The Azure Function engineers responded swiftly and they’ll extend the official docs with some guidelines in this area soon. I think this is a really interesting topic so let’s start with a few ideas of my own.

Durable Functions Videos

I’ve decided to create some video’s to explain and demonstrate the Durable Functions framework.

The first video covers a very basic ‘Hello World’ example and shows how to use the OrchestrationClient and DurableOrchestrationContext objects.

Here’s the video, please give it a thumbs up if you like it and subscribe to my channel so you’ll be notified of new videos.

Resources

The source code that is used for this demo can be found on GitHub.

Durable Function Walkthrough

In my previous post I gave an introduction on Durable Functions, an extension on Azure Functions which can be used to write stateful and long-running orchestration functions.

In this post we’ll look into more detail at the HttpStart and HelloWorld functions from the previous post. We’ll run them locally by triggering them using Postman and looking at the responses.

Durable Functions

Since my Getting started with Serverless Architectures using Azure Functions session at Techdays I’ve been closely monitoring the latest news about Azure Functions. The most recent addition is called Durable Functions. With this extension long running and stateful function orchestrations can be developed. This is a welcome addition to the Azure serverless product suite since it is now much easier to implement function chaining and fan-in/fan-out messaging scenarios.

Techdays 2017

A few weeks ago I was presented with a fantastic opportunity, to speak at the biggest Microsoft conference in the Netherlands, TechDays 2017. The session was about my favorite subjects nowadays, serverless architectures and Azure Functions.

Below you can find my slides of this session and a link to the demo I made.

Holiday Project

This summer holiday I’m working on a hobby project which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pi camera module. Part of the solution is uploading the pictures the Pi takes to the cloud, Microsoft Azure to be more specific. I plan to write a couple of blog posts about this project. This first post is about installing the Azure SDK on the Pi Zero.

In my previous post I described how to setup an automated build for a Sitecore Helix project. In this post I’ll be covering the configuration of the automated deployment environment using Octopus Deploy.