Development With A Dot

Service Discovery is a common pattern in distributed systems, like microservices, where one does not need to know the exact address of a resource, instead we ask some kind of database-backed service to get it for us. This is very useful to prevent hardcoding such addresses, instead they are discovered dynamically at runtime. There may be other functionality, but it may also include checking the health of a service first, or rotating the exact address to return, when there are many possibilities.

Request Features, or feature interfaces, offer a centralised way to access functionality that is commonly added by middleware in the pipeline. Features allow us to access information, or, in some case, control the behaviour of the middleware they belong to.

Rate limiting is sometimes known as throttling, even though they're not quite the same - rate limiting is more about fairness, making sure everyone gets a fair share (number of requests), whereas throttling is about limiting, or cutting down, the number of requests. The two are commonly used interchangeably.

Yesterday I did a talk on a joint Porto.DATA and Azure & AI User Group Portugal event (thanks, Ivan Campos and Pedro Sousa, for inviting me!) on using MongoDB with EF Core. The slides are here (Portuguese only, sorry!).

I updated some of the links in my blog, removed outdated/broken links, added a few others (friends, links collections). This will be the last thing I'll do before going on annual leave, be back by the end of August! Enjoy your vacations!

Having a way to evaluate the health status of our system has been around since ASP.NET Core 2.2. In a nutshell, the idea is, you register a number of health checks, and you run them all at some time to assess their state, if any of them returned anything other than healthy, then the system is considered to be either unhealthy or degraded.

The concept of getting the location for a given IP address is not exactly new, and some posts have been written about it already. Still, I wanted to write about it because I will need it for a later article, and, to add something, also explain how to get the weather forecast for the given location.

The HttpClient class is Microsoft’s recommended approach for making raw HTTP calls in .NET. It allows you to send arbitrary HTTP requests (including headers) through a request/response pipeline of message handlers. These handlers can be used to augment the request and response messages and add additional policies, such as retrying operations, handling errors, and so on. One thing that is missing from the out-of-the box behaviours is caching of GET requests (only ones that can be cached!), and that’s what I’ll be talking about here. The concepts introduced in this post will be used in a few days in another one, so please keep an open eye!