When I build infrastructure in Azure, I use terraform. I can’t force myself to use ARM templates, and I’m not yet convinced to use bicep. Terraform has flaws and problems, and HCL is not that intuitive initially, but after banging my head against the wall, we became friends.

In the first part I created a sample Blazor app, installed Playwright and created first test. This post is to get more comfortable with Playwright.

I started working with Playwright by accident. YouTube has shown me a recommendation - a short film by Nick Chapsas (yt | t) about testing user interfaces with SpecFlow and Playwright. While I admire the SpecFlow, BDD and Gherkin ideas - I still haven’t convinced myself to use them. But Playwright + C# have drawn my attention. Then I found a webinar recording with Andrey Lushnikov, and I was sold on Playwright.

In one of the projects, we store source files as JSON data on Azure Blob Storage. These files must be loaded into Azure SQL Database. We use a .NET code to perform this, but how could I load the files directly into Azure SQL Database?

NOTE: Recently (around 19th February 2021), the basic web app architecture got updated. The new version shows more possibilities, as it uses Azure Key Vault, Azure Monitor and introduces deployment slots.

When I switched to Hugo, I knew my new blog would not have the comments enabled. I planned it “for later”, as I didn’t want to use Disqus (available by default in Hugo).

This year I took part in “Advent of Code” - a challenge with the series of puzzles to solve using any programming language. I tried two years ago but resigned after the first day. This year was different, as we set the internal leaderboards, and I had a motivation to test my skills. My initial idea was to use only the PowerShell, but after some talks, I thought “maybe it’s a good moment to start learning go lang”?

Decision was made. And announced. And deadline set - so I will look stupid if I don’t do it. Something that was a strong decision started weakening. But setting a goal, and telling your friends about it is a strong motivator. Not to mention the WordPress annoyances during the transition period.

I blog with WordPress since the 17th of February 2009. At first, I used a blog-as-a-service approach, as I wanted just to start writing and see how it goes, not building all the infrastructure. I was writing for myself, to document interesting things I found during my adventures with SQL Server.

One of the new YAML pipeline steps I prepared recently involved interaction with work items. I wanted to add the comments to the task (with the task ID extracted from some file). So, I created a PowerShell step that was executing Invoke-WebRequest (with try/catch logic, obviously), the process finished successfully, but nothing happened. I mean - the comments were not there. Uhmmmm, why?! The log analysis gave me a slight hint about what was wrong (as seen in the post header picture):