Techtips

Linting tools, aka linters, can help you write better and cleaner code early in the software development lifecycle. Linter is a tool that scans existing and new code for potential errors, bad and insecure patterns and violations of the respective programming language best practices. In most cases you can install a linter as an IDE extension so that you can get notified about potential issues during local development, long before the code is checked in to your source code base. ...

⚠️ Please note that the HTTP Application routing add-on for AKS is now deprecated and will be retired on 3rd of March, 2025. Normally if you were to expose an application running in AKS for external access, you would need multiple bits and pieces to be deployed and configured: Ingress Controller to ensure proper traffic routing and load balancing in an AKS cluster; Certificate management solution for automatic obtaining, provisioning, renewing and using of TLS certificates for applications running in AKS clusters; DNS zone and respective DNS records to expose applications on a specific URL for external access; This can be quite a lot to set up and will in some cases be an overhead for dev/test or playground AKS clusters. That’s when HTTP Application Routing add-on can help you out and do all this work for you! 🚀 ...

One day I was going through Azure Policies for Kubernetes and suddenly saw an alert related to the following policy for one of the AKS clusters: Kubernetes clusters should not grant CAP_SYS_ADMIN security capabilities. What this basically means is that you shouldn’t have any accounts in your cluster that have been assigned a ClusterRole or Role with CAP_SYS_ADMIN capabilities. CAP_SYS_ADMIN is a capability that is available in Linux. It provides a very privileged level of permissions that allows an account that has this capability to perform a range of system administration operations which can potentially be harmful and damaging for the whole system. You can read more about this capability here: capabilities(7) — Linux manual page. ...

With release of .NET and .NET Core one significant change you may have noticed is the new version support lifecycle. .NET Framework LTS (long-time support) versions are normally supported for 5+ years by Microsoft but support lifecycle for .NET and .NET Core LTS versions has decreased to 3 years. The main reasons for the shorter support lifecycle are the overall faster technology evolvement, but also more active framework development which requires frequent releases both from the functional and security perspective. ...

There is one scary property in .NET which, if misused or forgotten, can make your security champions tremble at night…🙀🙀🙀 As scary as it sounds, the risk of forgetting or misusing the property is pretty serious and I've seen it multiple times sneaking into the source code as part of the pull request. And I keep seeing it still. Therefore this tech tip gets to see the world.☀️ The property I'm talking about is ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback that is part of a System.Net library. This property can be used for custom certificate validation in case you're using a non-trusted certificate authority. One of the scenarios when you can end up using this property is when you're developing and testing new functionality and you're using a self-signed TLS certificate on the server instead of production-level certificates. If this property is not set and you're using a non-trusted certificate, you may get errors like: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel. ...