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Derek Comartin

Sensitive Configuration Data in ASP.NET Core

While working on my new side-project in ASP.NET Core, I was at the point where I needed to start storing sensitive configuration data. Things like my DocumentDB Auth Key, Google OAuth ClientId & Secret, Twilio Auth Token, etc. Depending on your context you may not want to be storing these types of application settings in configuration files that are committed to source control. As you would expect, my local environment for development and once I deploy to Azure have completely different configurations. So how do you change the configuration from local to production? If you are used to using appSettings from the app.config… Read More »Sensitive Configuration Data in ASP.NET Core

Azure Cosmos DB Caching Tips

I’ve started to use Azure Cosmos DB a bit more over the last couple weeks and I’m really enjoying it.  The first real world scenario that I hit was needing to implement optimistic concurrency. This led me straight into I discovered two caching optimizations you can make for better performance accessing individual documents. Caching SelfLinks If you are using the .NET SDK, each document contains a unique SelfLink property.  This is represented by the _self property in the JSON. View the code on Gist. They are guaranteed to be unique and most importantly immutable. Because the SelfLink is immutable we… Read More »Azure Cosmos DB Caching Tips

Optimistic Concurrency in Azure Cosmos DB

I’ve started working on new side project using ASP.NET Core.  I wanted to try a new datastore and decided to give Azure Cosmos DB a try. This project isn’t doing anything complicated but does contain enough real world use cases that can give me an idea of how the API works. Concurrency The first thing I needed to implement was how to handle concurrency.  Specifically optimistic concurrency. In an optimistic concurrency model, a violation is considered to have occurred if, after a user receives a value from the database, another user modifies the value before the first user has attempted to modify it.… Read More »Optimistic Concurrency in Azure Cosmos DB