Just Five Mins!

Twillio has been around for ages (since 2008!).  I first came across it sometime around 2009 as a platform to send outbound SMS/Text messages and also to play with the inbound/outbound voice SDK too.

Twillio has moved on quite a bit and just to correct something in the podcast, Microsoft did not buy Twillio! instead, Twillio have raised a few rounds of funding.  I have a feeling Microsoft expressed interest at some point, but I will check my facts!

Twillio now has a whole bunch of offerings, and not in the least very cheap inbound numbers that can be used for voice/text to name a couple.  Right now, I have been using Twillio Studio to visually design workflows for incoming calls/texts in order to protect my own personal number/contacts.

https://www.twilio.com/

Sure, you can architect your own microservice architecture or use specific language/platform specific solutions but what if you could pick and choose not only what you needed but across whatever languages you want to use and hosting platforms/local servers.

Here are some excellent links to get you further if you wish to explore more about DAPR:

A great intro/visual with our friend Scott Hanselman and friends (2 parts to this):
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Learn-all-about-Distributed-Application-Runtime-Dapr-Part-1

Original announcement blog from 2019:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/announcing-dapr-open-source-project-build-microservice-applications/

Using DAPR with Azure functions (definitely on my list!):
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/07/01/announcing-azure-functions-extension-for-dapr/#:~:text=Azure%20Functions%20provides%20an%20event,set%20of%20capabilities%20Dapr%20provides.

Overview of DAPR on Github:
https://github.com/dapr/dapr

Github samples too!
https://github.com/dapr/samples

Just as a bonus, getting started with Actor Model - maybe a talk of its own!
https://github.com/dapr/dotnet-sdk/blob/master/docs/get-started-dapr-actor.md

gRPC - Remote Procedure Calls are not new, but gRPC (developed from Google around 2015) provides a very restricted interface for passing data between applications - binary compressed data for performance, has a wide adoption on many platforms.  Why use it? why is it different from SOAP or REST (or GraphQL even!).  Have a listen to find out more!

Here are a few links that will help take the gRPC subject further if you wish:

A great overview from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRPC
Bit more depth here with some examples too: https://grpc.io/docs/what-is-grpc/core-concepts/
If you don't want to read, then the MSDN Channel 9 peeps can help: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/On-NET/ASPNET-Core-Series-High-performance-requests-with-gRPC

What happens when you take Xamarin Forms, mix it up with a huge shake up of .NET... .NET MAUI or the full name of .NET Multi-Platform UI.

A single codebase, project to be able to code, test and build as well as deploy to not only native mobile (iOS, Android) but also to desktop forms too i.e. MacOS and Windows :)

It is part of a much larger change coming in .NET 5 but onwards to .NET 6 - one framework, many hats!

Here is the official link from the build conference announcement which obviously contains much more than just five minutes worth ;)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-platform-app-ui/

Wordpress is massively popular.  If you live and breath PHP then great, but if you don't, what if I told you of an approach that provides an MVC'ish style experience to build themes?

A framework called Timber can help!  coupled up with a templating engine called Twig makes for just a lovely experience!

Built by an agency (https://www.upstatement.com) and open source:

https://www.upstatement.com/timber/#whats-timber

Yes! you can also apply testing too: https://timber.github.io/docs/guides/testing/

JAMstack - Javascript, API's and Markup!

What is it?

• JAMStack: Javascript, API's and Markup
   
• Fast and secure sites and apps delivered by pre-rendering files
   and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement
   to manage or run web server
   
• Any project that relies on a tight coupling between client and server is not built with the Jamstack
   
• Microservice/Serverless API's - not exclusive to either but consumption of external/loosely coupled services
   
• Can be used with static site generators but can be plain old HTML/JS (frameworks allowed! i.e. Angular/Vue/React)
   

Why would I use it?

• Why wait for pages to build on the fly when you can generate them at deploy time? When it comes to minimizing the time to first byte, nothing beats pre-built files served over a CDN
   
• When your deployment amounts to a stack of files that can be served anywhere, scaling is a matter of serving those files in more places. CDNs are perfect for this, and often include scaling in all of their plans
   
• With server-side processes abstracted into microservice APIs, surface areas for attacks are reduced. You can also leverage the domain expertise of specialist third-party services

Links

Official JAMstack website
Netlify: a good place to start with JAMstack
Introduction to Azure Static Web Apps
A great 30 min walkthrough of building an Azure static web app (JAMstack style!) with John Papa

Introduction

• We are back, the pheonix edition!  Did you really miss us?
• Azure functions and more broadly FaaS (Functions as a service) which include amongst others, AWS Lambda and Netlify JAMStack (I think "toast" has to be deployment service here!)

Show

• What are azure functions and FaaS in general?
• Why would I use them?
• Platform tie-in?  Azure functions have a docker container with the Azure functions runtime
• Deployment.  Deploying from GIT (GitHub) with Azure Functions Kudu but you can use Azure Devops etc.
• Azure functions in a microservice world i.e. Queues/storage tables/event grid/pubsub patterns etc.
• More advanced: Azure durable functions i.e. Orchestrate several functions 

Wrap Up

* Will post the video walk-through soon!

Public Trello board for any Just Five Mins suggestions!  Created by my good friend Tim! (https://pod.timwise.co.uk/)
https://trello.com/b/4Jdod2L4/just5mins

Also, forgot to add the link to the official MS Azure Functions page, and remember, you can get a free Azure account and most of what the podcast covered is pretty much free anyway!
Azure Functions

Another dip into the vault! 

https://famous.co/

Almost back to the 80's (by the sound quality anyway!), this is the very first episode of Just Five Mins!
Might have been caught in a time-slip or something, as I am sure Steve Sanderson hadn't come up with Blazor back then? ... or had he!