Business solutions quite often need to deal with data in different formats and sometimes you cannot even rely on having the information available digitally.
Do not get caught in an analog trap
One way to solve this problem is to “digitize” required data on demand and this is, when Azure Computer Vision comes in handy. Microsoft just released a new Read API that helps to apply optical character recognition (OCR) on any type of pictures may they be scanned or photographed.
There is a C# sample available that enables you to jump-start your document recognition and processing operations.
You can also find introductory information on Azure Sphere, a very interesting security and connectivity IOT solution, in our latest Wechsler Consulting Cloud News Clip!
Quite often there are situations, where one needs dynamically changing information proactively delivered, as fast as possible. Stock market info is the poster child here, but there are quite a few other day-to-day use cases that also require close to real-time display of relevant data on many screens and across locations. Traffic information, factory line status, logistic tracking are to name as samples here.
Looking at the Microsoft technology stack, SignalR is the tool of choice to tackle these requirements. SignalR leverages several different approaches such as WebSockets, Server Sent Events or Long Polling, transparently for developers in the background, to deliver information needed in the best way possible. All based on the connectivity scenario / quality of a client application.
It is great to see that SignalR is now provided in “Serverless Mode” by Azure SignalR Service, which takes away scaling and infrastructure maintenance effort for this service from developers.
Following the very efficient “low code/serverless” approach, I am always propagating, I want to recommend having a look at this interesting sample, showing how to-do real-time communication leveraging the Serverless SignalR Service in combination with Azure Functions.
Take it from me, SignalR is a great and fun technology to work with!
Basically any application you are not hosting on your own server can be considered serverless. It should not need one of your servers as backend, of course. Due to this, even desktop apps can be considered serverless, but, nowadays, the mainstream approach has shifted to have an application using a backend API in the Cloud. Desktop apps also have installation and security issues and have been replaced by apps loaded from a store that takes care (or at least should) that no malware can be installed on your mobile or desktop client. This approach works well for commercial apps, but for custom business solutions the store overhead for registration with a store provider, additional costs of testing, is avoided by delivering HTML/JavaScript based single page applications (SPAs) to employees. Especially, if we are talking about internal business solutions.
These apps can either be loaded from a storage location in the Cloud, for example an Azure Blob, which even can be distributed world-wide via a content delivery network (CDN) for high-speed loading, or a web application hosted on as an Azure App service. A favor for using an Azure App Service is the additional infrastructure regarding, development and deployment, easy scaling, security as well as monitoring, one gets from the Azure App platform service.
To develop SPAs profound knowledge of HTML and JavaScript and frameworks such as Angular, jQuery, React, to name just the prominent ones, is required, if you want to achieve good to great results.
This development process is also not as fast as it was, for example in the past creating business Visual Basic applications, which had other issues, of course.
In this light it may be interesting that there is a new Microsoft NET Core technology on the horizon called Blazor, which enables developers to code web applications in a combination of HTML and C# with a full roundtrip development experience in Visual Studio. Blazer comes in two flavors or hosting models:
Hosted in an ASP.NET app service, running as server-sider code sending rendered HTML pages down to browser client. SignalR is used for interaction with backend.(available right now with ASP.NET Core 3.0)
Client app hosted in browser leveraging the new web assembly standard to be compatible wit all common browser engines. The local app can use web API calls or SignalR to communicate with the backend. (in the future available with .NET 5.0 – which includes ASP.NET Core – now in public preview)
Quite a bit of this new approach still is in the making, but what looks compelling to me is the re-use of C# skills in the UI layer in combination with the excellent tool support through Visual Studio. It also promises some reduction of complexity and dynamics looking at the fast changing releases of the JavaScript frameworks, which, quite often, makes it a challenge to do future-proof decisions for larger teams in longer lasting projects. Blazor, therefore also has the potential to improve development speed significantly!
There is a componentized approach coming with Blazor, as well, which was introduced long time ago in various Microsoft technologies ranging from VB to Office and also has been implemented by JavaScript frameworks such as React. Razor components ( which is the preceding ASP.Net server-side framework) can be re-used in Blazor and, due to this, a real good 3rd party offering, for grids, chart and gauge displays, calendars, data and time pickers, and whatever one needs for an application, is already available.
We will see how it evolves, but the first impression with Blazor is quite promising.
