With the increasing adoption of Microservices, one of the questions sometimes discussed is mono-repo vs. multi-repo, which tries to answer if you structure your code to have one large, single repository for all/multiple microservices or individual, small repositories for each microservice.

If you're in the scenario of using a mono-repo, where you have multiple projects in a single repo, and you want to deploy this single code-base to multiple applications and services in Azure, there is a simple way to do this.

Kudu, the engine behind git-deployments in Azure App Service, has documentation on how to customize deployments, but only one of these ways works well with the mono-repo-scenario. The approach of using a .deployment-file unfortunately locks the configuration of the specified project into your source-code, so it won't work for mono-repos.

Instead, using the Application settings available in all Azure App Services, you use the key PROJECT to set the value for the path of the project you want to be deployed to your different Azure App Services. So this solution works for Function Apps, Web Apps, API Apps and much more.

Example

If you have the following code-structure in your single repository:

• /src/ExampleProject/ExampleProject.csproj
• /src/ExampleProject.FunctionsApp/ExampleProject.FunctionsApp.csproj
• /src/ExampleProject.WebApiApp/ExampleProject.WebApiApp.csproj
• /src/ExampleProject.WebApp/ExampleProject.WebApp.csproj
• /test/ExampleProject.Tests/ExampleProject.Tests.csproj

Then you'd set up your PROJECT-path in Application settings for your different Application Services like this:

• Function App: "src/ExampleProject.FunctionsApp"
• Web App: "src/ExampleProject.WebApp"
• API App: "src/ExampleProject.WebApiApp"

With the paths relative to the Git-repository's root-path. You can also point directly to the .csproj-file, if there is any risk of ambiguity in the same file-folder.

When this is done you can configure your Azure App Services for Continuous Deployment using the same repository, in GitHub, Bitbucket, local Git or any other source supported in Azure.

There are scenarios when you need to convert an anonymous type in C#, or any other type, into a dynamic, or more specifically to the underlying ExpandoObject-type.

My specific need was to be able to move the data from an anonymous type from the current assembly into a dynamically executed external assembly. So I created an extension-method for this, which moves all the properties from any object into a new ExpandoObject.

public static ExpandoObject ToExpandoObject(this object obj)
{
    // Null-check

    IDictionary expando = new ExpandoObject();

    foreach (PropertyDescriptor property in TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(obj.GetType()))
    {
        expando.Add(property.Name, property.GetValue(obj));
    }

    return (ExpandoObject) expando;
}

You can use the extension-method on any type of object and choose to reference the resulting type by it's actual type ExpandoObject or as a dynamic.

var anonymous = new {Id = 123, Text = "Abc123", Test = true};

dynamic dynamicObject = anonymous.ToExpandoObject();
ExpandoObject expandoObject = anonymous.ToExpandoObject();

Since the code uses the type System.ComponentModel.TypeDescriptor, if you use .NET Core or .NET Standard, you might need to reference the Nuget-package named System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter.

If you've ever needed to ensure that multiple threads are not running the same code, you've probably used a lock-statement in your .NET/C#-code.

Sometimes a general lock can be too aggressive and lock too much running code for too long. You can solve this by cleverly locking on unique objects, but that handling is complex, error-prone and can become tedious.

Many times you know that you have a specific value or ID which is the key you want to lock on. For instance, you might want your code to not write to the database from multiple actions performed in parallel on your web-application. Using the Nuget-package KeyLocks will give you easy to write syntax to handle this:

private static KeyLock<string> _keyLock = new KeyLock<string>();

public void Main()
{
    Parallel.Invoke(
        () => { UpdateData("entity-123", "First new value"); },
        () => { UpdateData("entity-123", "Second new value"); }, // This will await line above
        () => { UpdateData("another-entity-456", "Another new value"); },        
        () => { UpdateData("yet-another-entity-789", "Yet another new value"); });
}

private void UpdateData(string id, string value)
{
    _keyLock.RunWithLock(id, () =>
    {
        // Execute locked code
    });
}

Make sure the instance of KeyLock<T> is shared between threads executing the code you want to lock on. In this case I solved it by making the instance static, and therefor shared across all instances of the code using it.

The package also contains the type NameLock is a short-hand term for KeyLock<string>. It defaults to being case-sensitive, but that can be changed by passing the correct IEqualityComparer<T> as a constructor-argument like this:

var nameLock = new NameLock(StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)

See the README-file on GitHub for the latest detailed information about KeyLocks. Or try it out through Nuget by running Install-Package KeyLocks in your project. You can even follow the absolutely latest build on MyGet.

According to Wikipedia the date and time-format RFC3339/ISO 8601 usages includes:

On the Internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses ISO 8601 in defining a profile of the standard that restricts the supported date and time formats to reduce the chance of error and the complexity of software.

My specific need to format a System.DateTime-value in a RFC3339-format came when I used one of Google's REST APIs and they required a parameter in the RFC3339-format. Here is the code is the extension-method which provides the functionality of formatting a DateTime as a string in RFC3339-format:

public static string ToRfc3339String(this DateTime dateTime)
{
    return dateTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.fffzzz", DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo);
}

There are many situations when you handle URLs or URIs in applications today, no matter if it's a web-application or not. Often you need to handle absolute URLs, like https://testsite.com/section/page, and relative URLs, like /section/page.html.

To easily convert URLs between absolute and relative, or just ensure these two formats, I created extension-methods for the type System.Uri, which allows you to write code like this:

var absoluteToRelative = new Uri("https://www.test-relative.com/customers/details.html").ToRelative();
// Outputs: "/customers/details.html"

var relativeToAbsolute = new Uri("/orders/id-123/", UriKind.Relative).ToAbsolute("https://www.test-absolute.com");
// Outputs: "https://www.test-absolute.com/orders/id-123/"

The extension-methods which makes this possible are the following:

public static string ToRelative(this Uri uri)
{
    // Null-check

    return uri.IsAbsoluteUri ? uri.PathAndQuery : uri.OriginalString;
}

public static string ToAbsolute(this Uri uri, string baseUrl)
{
    // Null-checks

    var baseUri = new Uri(baseUrl);

    return uri.ToAbsolute(baseUri);
}

public static string ToAbsolute(this Uri uri, Uri baseUri)
{
    // Null-checks

    var relative = uri.ToRelative();

    if (Uri.TryCreate(baseUri, relative, out var absolute))
    {
        return absolute.ToString();
    }

    return uri.IsAbsoluteUri ? uri.ToString() : null;
}