TWIL: September 5, 2021

Another week of learning and here are my highlights for the last seven days. Back to podcasts and a lot about architecture.

I hope you find it interesting too.


Podcasts

Last week there were no podcast recommendations, so this week I bring you three!

.NET Rocks

Episode 1753: Visual Studio 2022 Productivity with Mika Dumont
How much more productive can Visual Studio get? Carl and Richard talk to Mika Dumont about some of the new features coming in Visual Studio 2022 to help shorten your development inner loop. Mika talks about some of the new code analyzer capabilities working within the Roslyn service that you can customize – and create your own! The conversation explores how these tools can add code automatically to save you typing, like adding using constructs on paste. It’s a challenge to get the balance right between helping and interrupting, but the team works hard on it – and listens to your feedback to make it better.

Episode 1754: Domain-Driven Design in 2021 with Steve Smith and Julie Lerman
Julie and Steve return! Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman and Steve Smith about their new version of the Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course. The conversation starts focused on Open AI Codex, a project for writing code with the spoken (or typed) word – and how that is an example of focusing on domain implementation – because the AI is doing the functional implementation from your words! Julie and Steve also dig into how DDD has evolved since their original class in 2014, including using event storming to help gather all the important information around a project in an enjoyable way.

The Azure Podcast

Episode 389 – Azure Logic Apps
The team talks to Bec Lyons, Program Manager of Logic Apps about the latest offering of Standard Logic Apps, connectors, and how to decide when to use Power Automate or Logic Apps.


Authentication and Authorization in Microservices

I’ve been diving into the topic of authorization in microservice architectures, and specifically using Open Policy Agent (OPA) as a flexible and scalable solution to handle this concern.

Authentication as a Microservice
Session on an Oracle event about authentication in a microservices world. Really clear explanation on how JWT tokens work and how they can be leveraged for a variety of authentication and authorization scenarios.

Deep Dive: Open Policy Agent – Torin Sandall, Styra
Session on CloudNativeCon North America 2018 about Open Policy Agent by one of its creators.

Securing Dockerized Microservices With Open Policy Agent and Envoy
This blog post describes how to use OPA and Envoy to enforce authorization policies for a service. This is meant to demonstrate how dockerized services can easily use OPA in a non-Kubernetes environment.

Write Policy in OPA. Enforce Policy in SQL.
This post explains how to use OPA and SQL to protect access to sensitive data in your services without impacting consistency, performance, or scalability. It is shown how to translate OPA policies into SQL and enforce them within the database.


Cool Stuff

Microsoft is finally ditching Electron
The senior vice president of Microsoft Teams announced that Teams would be moving to their own Edge Webview2 Rendering Engine ditching Electron for seeking performance gains. It is marketed that Teams would consume 2x less memory as a result of the transition. It would be called Teams 2.0 and might ship with Windows 11 in late 2022.


Have a great week! Happy learning!

Photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash