If you deploy a Node.js application to Azure, you might want to use Azure Application Insights to monitor it. This post shows you how to set up a Node.js application with Azure Application Insights. It also includes a Fastify plugin to automatically track requests. (Given the out of the box mechanism for tracking requests does not work with Fastify.)

This is one of those posts that gathers together information I found doing research and puts it in one place.

If you work with Azure Pipelines, you'll likely have come upon the need to create service connections. These are the connections to external services that your pipelines need to run. You can interrogate these connections using the Azure DevOps REST API. This post goes through how to do this; both using curl and using TypeScript.

I'm writing this post because when I attempted to use the Azure DevOps Client for Node.js package to acquire them I found it lacking, and not for the first time. I am going to allow myself a little moan here; ever since Microsoft acquired GitHub, the Azure DevOps ecosystem feels like it has had insufficient investment.

However, as is often the case, there is a way. The Azure DevOps REST API is there for us, and with a little fetch we can get the job done.

In the world of computing, slash commands have a proud and noble history. They are a way to interact with a system by typing a command into a chat or terminal, usually with a / preceding the command; hence the name "slash commands". GitHub has its own slash commands that you can use in issues and pull requests to add code blocks and tables etc. The slash commands are, in truth, quite limited.

However, through clever use of the GitHub Actions platform, it's possible to build something quite powerful which is "slash-command-shaped". In this post, we'll look at how to implement a /deploy slash command which, when invoked in a pull request, will deploy an Azure Container App with GitHub Actions.

The technique we'll use is covering a deployment usecase, as we'll see, it could be adapted to many other scenarios.

I recently needed to include a number of .gitignore and .npmrc files in an npm package. I was surprised to find that the npm publish command strips these out of the published package by default. As a consequence, This broke my package, and so I needed to find a way to get round this shortcoming.

I ended up using zipping and unzipping with postinstall and prepare scripts to include these files into my npm package.

This post shows how to use zipping and unzipping with postinstall and prepare scripts to include these files into your npm package.

The npx command is a powerful tool for running CLI tools shipped as npm packages, without having to install them globally. npx is typically used to run packages on the public npm registry. However, if you have a private npm feed, you can also use npx to run packages available on that feed.

Azure Artifacts is a feature of Azure DevOps that supports publishing npm packages to a feed for consumption. (You might want to read this guide on publishing npm packages to Azure Artifacts.) By combining npx and Azure Artifacts, you can deliver your CLI tool to consumers in a way that's easy to use and secure.

This post shows how to use npx and Azure Artifacts to deliver your private CLI tool to consumers.

Azure DevOps has a feature called Azure Artifacts that supports publishing npm packages to a feed for consumption. Publishing a private npm package with Azure DevOps is a common scenario for teams that want to share code across projects or organizations. This post shows how to publish a private npm package with Azure DevOps.

Publishing a private npm package with Azure DevOps is fairly straightforward, but surprisingly documentation is a little sparse.

Azure DevOps has a feature called Azure Artifacts that supports publishing npm packages to a feed for consumption. Typically those npm packages are intended to be consumed by a restricted audience. To install a package published to a private feed you need to configure authentication, and for non Windows users this is a convoluted process.

azdo-npm-auth exists to ease the setting up of local authentication to Azure DevOps npm feeds, particularly for non Windows users.

When I attempted to set the column of a User Story in Azure DevOps using the Azure DevOps Client for Node.js, I was surprised to find that the field System.BoardColumn was read-only and I bumped into the error:

TF401326: Invalid field status 'ReadOnly' for field 'System.BoardColumn'.

This post explains how to set the column of a User Story in Azure DevOps using the Azure DevOps Client for Node.js and it's based in part on a Stack Overflow question.

I use Playwright for testing and mock Web Socket calls with the ws package. I recently did an npm upgrade and found myself hitting this error message when I tried to run tests:

SyntaxError: The requested module 'ws' does not provide an export named 'WebSocketServer'

It was caused by the following code:

import { WebSocketServer } from "ws"; // this goes bang!

// ...

const mockWsServer = new WebSocketServer({ port: 5000 });

The fix was surprisingly simple to implement but hard to search for. That's why I'm writing this.

Resolving "The requested module 'ws' does not provide"...​

This fix is as simple switching the code to:

import ws from "ws";

// ...

const mockWsServer = new ws.Server({ port: 5000 });

And that should resolve the issue.

The MUI X Data Grid is a really handy component for rendering tabular data in React applications. But one thing that is not immediately obvious is how to use TypeScript to ensure that the columns you pass to the component are correct. This post will show you how to do that.

Why does it matter? Well look at this screenshot of the Data Grid with incorrect column names:

It's possible to statically type check a JavaScript codebase with TypeScript with JSDoc annotations. Going a little further, and using typescript-eslint to lint your codebase with the benefits of type information can improve your code quality even more. This post will show you how to set this up and talk about some of the gotchas.

We'll also talk a little about how to use TypeScript in combination with JSDoc annotations in a JavaScript codebase.

This post is a follow on from the post Using AZD for faster incremental Azure Container App deployments in Azure DevOps. In that post, we looked at how to speed up deployments of Azure Container Apps in Azure DevOps using the Azure Developer CLI (azd). In this post, we're going to look at how to speed up deployments of Azure Static Web Apps in GitHub Actions using azd.

There's going to be some overlap between the last post and this one. I don't want to force you to read them both, so I'll duplicate some of the content from the previous post here. But I'll also add some new content that's specific to deploying Azure Static Web Apps in GitHub Actions with azd.

When deploying Azure Container Apps from Azure DevOps, you can use the azd command to speed up deployments that do not affect infrastructure. Given that when you're deploying, it's far more common to be making a code and / or content change and not an infrastructure one, this can be a significant time saver.

If you're looking for information on how to use azd to speed up deployments of Azure Static Web Apps in GitHub Actions, then you might want to read this post.

I'm a big fan of the Material-UI (MUI) library treeview component. I recently needed to do some customisation of the nodes in the treeview component I was rendering. The application I was working on acquired data for each node in our treeview component asynchronously. I wanted to show a loader for each node that was still loading.

Achieving this required passing data to individual nodes in the treeview component. This appears to not be officially supported by the MUI treeview component. However, it is possible and this post will show you how to do it.

The comment on this GitHub issue suggests that this will be directly supported in MUI v6. Until that time, you'll have to slightly hack the component to achieve this.

I've written previously about how to check children and uncheck parents in the MUI treeview component. This post builds on that one. But, you need not be using multiselect / checkboxes etc to use the approach in this post. It applies generally to usage of the treeview component.

I've written previously about combining Web Workers and Comlink. I recently found myself needing to use Web Workers again. As I picked them up this time I found myself making some different choices, now I was working in a codebase that used Vite to build. I ended up using TanStack Query in combination with my Web Workers and Comlink. It was a really good fit and this post will show you how to use Web Workers with Comlink and TanStack Query.

I often use the Azure Static Web Apps CLI for local development. It's not only handy when building Azure Static Web Apps, but also when building other types of web app, which also rely upon both a frontend server and some kind of API server. The Azure Static Web Apps CLI is particularly handy if you want to spoof authentication / authorization as well.

Changes in the behaviour of Node.js in version 17 caused issues with the Static Web Apps CLI. You can read a previous post which discussed this. However, whilst the issue was fixed in version 1.1.4 of the Static Web Apps CLI, it caused significant performance regressions in the CLIs dev server functionality.

This post shows you how to improve your developer experience by using Vite server proxy instead.

If you need to publish a package that supports both ECMAScript modules (ESM) and CommonJS modules (CJS), you can use tsup to do so. This post will show you how to do that and how to ensure that the types are correct using the tool Are the Types Wrong?.

Every now and then, I need to use a treeview component in a React application. The Material-UI (MUI) library provides a treeview component that is very useful. However, some of the default behaviours of the component differ from that which you typically find in a treeview component. I'm speaking, of course, about node selection. I'm used to a treeview component that, when a parent node is selected, auto selects the child nodes underneath. And by turn, when nodes are deselected, the parent nodes get deselected.

This post documents how to implement this behaviour with the MUI treeview component.

Since initially writing this, I've learned that it is likely that the kind of behaviour I'm hand-rolling here, will natively land in the component. So, all being well, what follows should become unnecessary! To track native support watch this GitHub issue.

Let's start with "why". Imagine you have an operation that you'd like to perform, but before that operation is performed, some other things need to take place first. Maybe it needs to be approved by someone, maybe you need an explicit record of what method is to be executed.

Now you could build a mechanism to manually cater for each scenario that triggered a method call. But that's a lot of boilerplate code for each implementation, and given we might want to cater for many scenarios, it wouldn't scale particularly well as an approach.

So how can we take a method call, serialise it, perhaps store it in a database, and then later rehydrate and execute?

Of late, I've been involved in work to integrate APIs into LLM interactions, using Semantic Kernel. This post is something of a brain dump on the topic. Given how fast this space is moving, I expect what is written here to be out of date, possibly even before I hit publish. But nevertheless, I hope it's useful.