Arin's Tech Musings

 For those of use that use or have implemented an Azure API Management instance, one feature that we have all looked for is a way to perform "Request Schema Validation" for incoming requests. Quite strangely, this much wanted feature is not a part of Azure API Management yet, although, there has been a User Voice request open since 2016 but the item is still marked as "Under Review". If you want to vote for this feature, you can Vote Here . Although this feature has not been picked up by Microsoft engineers yet, this has not in any way dampened the enthusiasm around Azure API Management as an API Management tool. And as with most things, the community adapted and found workarounds to achieve what they otherwise expected out of the box. In this blog, I will first describe the most common workaround and also the limitations that you might run into with it. Then of course, I will share how I circumvented this limitation with another workaround. Using a Logic App The mo...

A lot of us would already be familiar with Azure API Management and might already be using it extensively as a gateway for our backend services. "API Management (APIM) is a way to create consistent and modern API gateways for existing back-end services. You can use Azure API Management to take any backend and launch a full-fledged API program based on it." -  Official Microsoft Documentation It is fairly easy to set-up and get started. But then over time, when the backend services or API goes through evolution, arises the need to have continuity while at the same time being able to make available updated APIs and/or backend services. If you are not familiar with Azure API Management, I recommend reading the Official Microsoft Documentation . Microsoft announced the public preview of "Versions and Revisions in Azure API Management" on September 14, 2017. 3 years later, I see that there are still quite some questions on the effective use of these features in a lot of ...

For those that have been working with conversational interfaces namely bots, both developers and business users, have at some point come across the term transcript. So what is a " bot transcript file "? According to docs.microsoft.com, "A bot transcript file is a specialized JSON file that preserves the interactions between a user and your bot. A transcript file preserves not only the contents of a message, but also interaction details such as the user id, channel id, channel type, channel capabilities, time of the interaction, etc. All of this information can then be used to help find and resolve issues when testing or debugging your bot." If we look closely at this definition, we can see that a transcript is much more than just contents of messages exchanged between user and bot. It contains a lot more information in it's raw form. Thereby, it is quite evident that a transcript has use for both business users and developers. How can a business user use...