Integrating Azure Functions with Cosmos DB SQL API in .NET Core 2.

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ZACH GARDNER SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 .NET CORE, AZURE, TECHNOLOGY SNAPSHOT, TUTORIAL
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I am working on a project that leverages both Azure Functions as well as Cosmos DB.
In trying to get both of these components wired together, I found that there are
very few examples that work with the most recent versions of these components. I
also saw examples that could work at a small scale, but don�t show industry-
standard best practices, and would lead to performance issues if deployed in an
environment with any meaningful traffic.

To that end, I put together this blog post showing how to set up an Azure Functions
project in .NET Core 2.2 to integrate with Cosmos DB�s SQL API using its native
tooling.

.NET COREAPIAZURECOSMOS DBMICROSOFTSQL

With the introduction of .Net Core 3.0, Microsoft has built its own web UI
framework.

Introducing Blazor: Microsoft�s fully C# client-side framework. With the help of

its Razor platform, Microsoft is attempting to put its hat in the ring with the
likes of Angular, React, and Vue.

Blazor allows developers to fully design and execute web pages purely with C# � it
is meant to eliminate the need for JavaScript. The goal is also to hopefully limit
the number of vulnerabilities found in front-end UI work.

In this post, we give an introduction to Blazor and a quick tutorial for getting
started.

Given the maturity of the .NET Framework and the automated nature of its memory
management, many developers are guilty of glossing over (or even outright ignoring)
whether their code is optimal in terms of CPU and memory usage. Personally, I have
caught myself making sure my code is maintainable, testable, and extendable while
forgetting to consider memory management in terms of nonfunctional aspects.

While the .NET runtime does a great job and memory corruption is extremely rare, we
should still be concerned with memory management, particularly in large-scale .NET
base applications.

This concern isn�t limited to on-premise applications. It�s easy to forget about
memory usage with cloud computing. Azure Functions and AWS Lambda have billing
structures based upon the average memory size per second of function execution. The
direct correlation between memory usage and cost couldn�t be more transparent.

Fortunately, there are many great tools to help profile and analyze your memory
footprint. JetBrains has a fantastic tool called dotMemory which makes it easy to
profile processes, auto detect issues, perform deep analysis, and determine
traffic. dotMemory can be installed as either a stand-alone tool or as a part of
the ReSharper package integrated into Visual Studio.

In this post, we�ll show how to use dotMemory to generate a memory profile and
analyze a memory leak in a .NET Core application.

Have you ever wanted to create an automated way to load, manipulate, and then act
upon a web page?

Using CEFSharp (and some strategic JavaScript), you can create headless (no GUI)
interfaces of Chrome�s parent browser, Chromium, and then instruct them to do
pretty much anything a web browser can do.

This is a tutorial about using CEFSharp to accomplish some basic web functions with
simple examples. We�ll create three automated bots that can simulate user web
interaction and programmatically react to browser events using CEF and the CEFSharp
library. You can follow along by copying the code provided or by downloading�

Dapper is a micro ORM (Object Relational Mapper) for .NET that is nearly as fast as
using a raw ADO.NET data reader. It is a great alternative to Entity Framework,
especially when performance is a top priority and you don�t need all the features
of a �heavy� ORM.

In this post, I will provide an example of creating a generic CRUD repository that
leverages the performance of Dapper while providing flexibility for a multitude of
scenarios..