This post grew out of my desire to improve the metadata for my blog posts. I have been blogging for more than ten years, and the majority of my posts lack descriptions. A description is meta tag that sits in a page and describes the contents of the page. This is what this posts description meta tag looks like in HTML:

<meta
  name="description"
  content="Use the TypeScript Azure Open AI SDK to generate article metadata."
/>

Descriptions are important for search engine optimisation (SEO) and for accessibility. You can read up more on the topic here. I wanted to have descriptions for all my blog posts. But writing around 230 descriptions for my existing posts was not something I wanted to do manually. I wanted to automate it.

I am excited to announce that a documentary has been made about TypeScript! It premiered on YouTube at 5pm British Summertime September 21st 2023.

I had the good fortune to be involved in the making of the documentary. In part this was thanks to my work on Definitely Typed. Another reason was my work on recording the history of DefinitelyTyped.

You can see it on YouTube here or hit play on the embedded video above. Thanks to the Keyboard Stories team for making this happen!

We're currently in the gold rush period of AI. The world cannot get enough. A consequence of this, is that rationing is in force. It's like the end of the second world war, but with GPUs. This is a good thing, because it means that we can't just spin up as many resources as we like. It's a bad thing, for the exact same reason.

If you're making use of Azure's Open AI resources for your AI needs, you'll be aware that there are limits known as "quotas" in place. If you're looking to control how many resources you're using, you'll want to be able to control the capacity of your deployments. This is possible with Bicep.

This post grew out of a GitHub issue around the topic where people were bumping on the message the capacity should be null for standard deployment as they attempted to deploy. At the time that issue was raised, there was very little documentation on how to handle this. Since then, things have improved, but I thought it would be useful to have a post on the topic.

This post explains how to integrate the tremendous test runner Vitest with the continuous integration platform Azure Pipelines. If you read the post on integrating with Jest, you'll recognise a lot of common ground with this. Once again we want:

1. Tests run as part of our pipeline
2. A failing test fails the build
3. Test results reported in Azure Pipelines UI

Azure Container Apps supports custom domains via certificates. If you're looking to make use of the managed certificates in Azure Container Apps using Bicep, then you might want to take a look at this post on the topic.

This post will instead look at how we can use the "bring your own certificates" approach in Azure Container Apps using Bicep. Well, as much as that is possible; there appear to be limitations in what can be achieved with Bicep at the time of writing.

A new feature arrives with TypeScript 5.1, it is described as "Decoupled Type-Checking Between JSX Elements and JSX Tag Types".

It's all about handing control of JSX type definitions to libraries. With this feature, libraries can control what types are used for JSX elements. Why does this matter? Great question! Until version 5.1, TypeScript did an imperfect job of representing what is possible with JSX. This feature allows libraries to do a better job of that, and we'll look into it in this post.

It's probably worth saying, that this is a complicated feature. If you don't understand it (and as the author of this post I'll confess that I had to work quite hard to understand it), that is okay. This is a low level feature that is only likely to be used by library / type definition authors. It's a primitive that will unlock possibilites for people writing JSX - but it's something that people will mainly feel the benefit of, without directly doing anything themselves, or necessarily noticing that things have changed for the better.

Azure Container Apps support managed certificates and custom domains. However, deploying them with Bicep is not straightforward - although it is possible. It seems likely there's a bug in the implementation in Azure, but I'm not sure. Either way, it's possible to deploy managed certificates and custom domains using Bicep. You just need to know how.

If, instead, you're looking to make use of the "bring your own certificates" approach in Azure Container Apps using Bicep, then you might want to take a look at this post on the topic.

I've facetiously subtitled this post "a three pipe(line) problem" because it took three Azure Pipelines to get it working. This is not Azure Pipelines specific though, it's just that I was using Azure Pipelines to deploy the Bicep. Really, this applies to any way of deploying Bicep. GitHub Actions, Azure CLI or whatever.

If you're here because you've encountered the dread message:

Creating managed certificate requires hostname '....' added as a custom hostname to a container app in environment 'caenv-appname-dev'

Then you're in the right place. I'm going to explain how to get past that error message and get your custom domain working with your Azure Container App whilst still using Bicep. It's going to get ugly. But it will work.

Easy Auth is a great way to authenticate your users. However, when used in the context of Azure Container Apps, .NET applications do not, by default, recognise that Easy Auth is in place. You might be authenticated but .NET will still act as if you aren't. builder.Services.AddAuthentication() and app.UseAuthentication() doesn't change that. This post explains the issue and solves it through the implementation of an AuthenticationHandler.

If you deploy Bicep templates to Azure in Azure DevOps, you'll likely use the dedicated Azure DevOps task; the catchily named AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3. This task has had support for deploying Bicep since early 2022. But whilst vanilla Bicep is supported, there's a use case which isn't supported; private Bicep registries.

I make use of Azure Static Web Apps a lot. I recently upgraded to Node.js 18 and found that the Static Web Apps CLI no longer worked when trying to run locally; the API would not connect when running swa start:

[swa] ❌ Could not connect to "http://localhost:7071/". Is the server up and running?

This post shares a workaround.

I really like type imports that are unambiguous. For this reason, I've made use of the "importsNotUsedAsValues": "error" option in tsconfig.json for a while now. This option has been deprecated in TypeScript 5.0.0, and will be removed in TypeScript 5.5.0. This post will look at what you can do instead.

I wrote previously about how to implement a dynamic redirect mechanism for Azure Static Web Apps using Azure Functions. I implemented this using JSDoc JavaScript. I've since migrated this to TypeScript and I thought it would be interesting to share the process.

I've written previously about sending Teams notifications using a webhook, and it's a technique I've used a lot. But I've always wanted to be able to send a direct message to a user, and that's not possible with the webhook approach. I work with a marvellous fellow named Chris Tacey-Green, and he's figured out a way to do this using Power Automate and the Teams Notification API. I'm going to describe how he did it here, with a little help from him.

It's probably worth saying, both Chris and I work for Investec, and we're going to share some of the things we've learned about using Teams and Power Automate in the hope that it's useful to others. But we're not speaking on behalf of Investec, and we're not suggesting that this is the best way to do things. This is likely in the "do things that do not scale" category. Significantly though, it works!

You will see some screenshots of our internal Teams environment, but we've tried to keep them to a minimum, and we're not going to share any sensitive information.

I've written previously about using Structured Data with React. This post goes a little further and talks about how to use Structured Data with Docusaurus and MDX. More specifically it looks at how to create a component that both renders FAQs into a page, and the same information as Structured Data.

When sending a single item array to a Bicep template you may get an error like this:

ERROR: InvalidTemplate - Deployment template validation failed: 'Template parameter 'allowedIPAddresses' was provided an invalid value. Expected a value of type 'Array', but received a value of type 'String'.

This is down to the fact that Bash arrays when used with the Azure CLI can be a little surprising. If we initialise a single item array then it's not an array. It's a string. This is a bit of a pain when you're trying to pass a single item array to a Bicep template. It's possible to work around this with JSON and Bicep user defined types. Let's see how.

Azure Static Web Apps staging environments allow you to test changes before they go live. This post shows how to use Playwright against staging environments with GitHub Actions. It's a follow up to my previous post on using Lighthouse with Azure Static Web Apps staging environments.

I've wanted to take a look at some of the alternative JavaScript runtimes for a while. The thing that has held me back is npm compatibility. I want to be able to run my code in a runtime that isn't Node.js and still be able to use npm packages. I've been using ts-node for a long time now; it's what I reach for when I'm building any kind of console app. In this post I want to port a console app from ts-node to Bun and see how easy it is.

Node.js 18 doesn't allow legacy TLS renegotion by default. But some APIs still need it. This post shows how to support them with Axios.

Not everyone values pull requests. I really do, and this post explains why.

By default, Docusaurus blogs don't add breadcrumb Structured Data to their blog posts. It's not hard to make it happen though; this post shows how to add it using the JSON-LD format.