Michael S. Collier

Microsoft Build 2025 centered on the future of intelligent agent-based applications. This post recaps my four-day experience in Seattle attending Build, covering keynotes, developer sessions, GitHub Copilot updates, .NET Aspire insights, and hands-on labs. Get a firsthand look at emerging trends and tools shaping how we build AI-powered solutions in the Microsoft ecosystem.

It has been over 2 years since I’ve posted an update to this blog. I miss writing. It’s time I get back to writing about what I’ve been working on and what’s on my mind. The start of a new year is as good of time as any to get back to blogging.

While I’m at it, I might as well share my New Year’s resolutions for 2024.

I was recently faced with a scenario where I needed a script to deploy an Azure Function. Specifically, there was a desire to use a REST API to deploy a .zip file of the Function app.

The documentation for “Deploy ZIP file with REST APIs” indicates this is possible via a HTTP POST request to https://{APP-NAME}.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/zipdeploy. One challenge with the current documentation is the stated need to use HTTP BASIC authentication. Needing to use BASIC authentication is a problem if BASIC authentication is disabled.

I recently started experimenting with the beta versions of the new Azure Storage and Event Hub extensions for Azure Functions. The new extensions use the new Azure SDK, and as a result, include support for using Azure AD to authenticate to specific Azure resources (a.k.a., managed identities). I’m a fan of having fewer secrets to manage. Less secrets . . . more better. 😉

This intent of this blog post is to share my initial experiences with the extensions. It’s still early, and thus I expect a few bumps in along the way.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to join The Azure Podcast team to talk about my experiences with Azure Functions. We discussed how I came to love working with Azure, my journey from classic Cloud Services to Azure Functions, and the current state of virtual networking with Azure Functions.

This was my second time on the podcast. My first appearance was a little more than 5 years ago after the release of a book I co-authored, Fundamentals of Azure.