We’ve wrapped up an eventful year and we’re greatly looking forward to continued innovation with our clients and partners while applying what we’ve learned toward new ventures in 2021.
Our team has enjoyed sharing their expertise as well as covering trending topics across the cloud, UX, and data industries on our blog. Overall, we noted a distinct interest in developer minded content and technical walkthroughs. At Tallan, we pride ourselves on operating right at the cutting edge in how we serve our customer’s needs. This is prudent, especially at a time when many businesses have relied on technology to stay afloat in make-or-break operational adjustments. Here were our most read blog posts of 2020:
1. Parsing Delimited Strings in a SQL Database
This post tackles the obstacle of parsing a delimited string inside a SQL database – perfect content for those who find themselves in a position to provide solutions to this issue as well as those who enjoy taking on SQL challenges. Author Terry Bomberger poses an engaging challenge through SQL puzzles with the goal of producing key-value pairs using the provided data.
2. Accessing SQL Server with Managed Identities
Every developer knows that keeping credentials in code is a substandard practice, however, some still have that moment of weakness, typically followed by, “It’ll just be temporary.” The simple fact is that storing credentials in an inconspicuous configuration file during development is just the easy way out. This is why Microsoft developed Managed Identities for Azure resource. Managed Identities used to securely gain access to an Azure KeyVault are an easy and safe way to store and access secrets for your application.
In this post, Mattia Schiano explores skipping the KeyVault step and having the SQL server authenticate directly with your application using its managed identity.
A common tactic then is to migrate all the sensitive connection strings into the KeyVault and simply pulling those down for the application to connect into a SQL server. However, authenticating to an Azure resource to retrieve the credentials to connect and authenticate with another Azure resource can seem a bit redundant. In this post, Mattia Schiano explores skipping the KeyVault step and having the SQL server authenticate directly with your application using its managed identity.
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3. Creating Secure AJAX HTML Forms in ASP.NET Core MVC, Part 2: Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks
In this two part series, Joseph Tonski demonstrates how to create a secure submission form using Ajax. In part one of this series, he created an HTML form and secured it from XSS and SQL Injection by validating user input through client-side and server-side validation. In Part 2, Joseph explains how to create an HTML form that submits using AJAX, and how to protect it from Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks.
4. Introducing the Power BI Paginated Report Builder
We highlight and educate developers and business users on many Microsoft technologies that used in our services and projects. Power BI is one of the most sought after educational events at the moment, and while we cannot host in-person workshops as normal, our team has pivoted to deliver virtual events as if the internet has historically been our go-to venue.
In this post, Bill Pearson discusses the concept of paginated reports, how they typically differ from the dashboard reporting delivered by Power BI, and how Microsoft anticipates and answers the need for generating paginated reports with the Power BI Paginated Report Builder. Also discussed are prerequisites for using the Paginated Report Builder, as well as general considerations for using it to design reports.
We highlight and educate developers and business users on many Microsoft technologies that we use in our services and projects.
5. Cloud Development with Microservices in Azure
Cloud development sometimes winds up looking a lot like traditional application development and hosting. Developers can create large, monolithic web applications and deploy them to a virtual machine or app service. In that sense, transitioning to Azure can be simple for most developers. However, to make best use of Azure, developers need to start thinking differently about their software architecture in terms of microservices.
In this post, Joseph Tonski elaborates on Microservices, a software architecture style in which applications are composed of small, independent modules that communicate with each other using well-defined API contracts.
Posts with Longest Page Views
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Upon assessing our 2020 website analytics, we also determined the Tallan blog posts with longest viewing duration. This data provided interesting insight into how professionals working in technology utilize our content. Below are the top three posts in terms of visitor viewing duration. Interestingly, all of these posts were originally created before 2020, going as far back as 2012! It goes to show that as much as our technology practices advance, many core strategies remain linear.
1. Parsing HTML using jsoup library
2. Adding a User to your Azure Subscription with Resource Group Access
3. Analysis Services Tabular: Introduction to a Series
Make sure you’re staying up to date with our latest blog posts, here. Every week we post new content benefitting both seasoned developers and those just starting out!
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