Modern buildings are well isolated, which isn’t good if you are making a mobile phone call. Outside your house or office, the cellular signal is perfect, but inside it is another story, dropped calls, low-quality sound, etc. Even when your carrier has high coverage, there are situations inside buildings that prevent you from making a call.

Most mobile network providers (carriers) provide a solution for this, called WiFi Calling. By utilizing the existing WiFi network in your home or office, the mobile phone can make calls. The phone call is routed throw your Internet connection back to your carrier. Phone calls are not free and cost still money when WiFi Calling is enabled.

Today, when a website does not have an SSL/TSL certificate, web browsers give you a warning not secure. This warning not only scares people but also gives you a disadvantage in search engine ranking. On Azure, web sites have a default https-enabled URL, like https://sitename.azurewebsites.net/, but when you have a vanity domain configured, you are missing this secure connection. Luckily there are some free SSL/TLS certificate options to explore.

Let’s Encrypt

Wait, there is Let’s Encrypt, its free! Why are you not using this excellent service? Yes, that is true, but there are some downsides to use Let’s Encrypt (on Azure), like:

I learned all my basic computer and programming skills on Commodore computers, like the C64, Amiga 500, and 1200. Twenty-eight years ago, I upgraded my Amiga 1200 with a faster processor (Motorola 68030) and extra memory (4 megabytes). I also added an FPU (Motorola 68882), a realtime clock, and an internal hard disk (120 megabytes), which is still working correctly in 2020 (wow). At that time, this was a fast Amiga.

Saving the planet a little bit while trying out new technology is fantastic, and in the end, it will save me also some money. When building my house last year, I invested in solar energy. The sun delivers me free electricity during the day, especially around noon, but I use it mainly at the end of the day and the beginning of the evening. Most of my solar energy goes to the public energy grid, and I need to repurchase it in the evening. This buying back makes no send to me. I like to use my own ‘free’ solar energy, so I need a way to store it. After some research, I selected the Tesla Powerwall 2 for my energy storage, not only for the best capacity, but my energy company (Eneco) had a good deal (2.500,- euro cashback). In the Netherlands, I can also get the tax back I paid for the solar and Tesla Powerwall 2 energy installation, an extra savings of 21%. The investment is still high, but after 5 or 6 years, it should be making money.

Microsoft provides for most Azure services an Service Level Agreements (SLA), where you can find the availability for that services. The availability has a rage from 99.9% to 100% or no range at all (for some free services).

“We guarantee that 99.95% of the time, the Azure … Service will successfully receive and respond to …”

The SLA describes Microsoft’s commitments for uptime and connectivity. It is also somewhat guaranteed, i.e., it is backed financially. It shows Microsoft will refund you when it fails the SLA, but it doesn’t back your business.

This post describes how to set up, run, and debug PHP code with Visual Studio Code running on Windows.

What do we need?

Compared to some other popular programming languages for the Web, PHP is missing some tools, so I created a shopping list to make the experience more complete.

Basically what we need is:

• the PHP runtime itself,
• a modern code editor with syntax highlighting,
• a debugger connected to our code editor,
• and a (development) webserver.

Runtime (PHP)

We start with the PHP runtime. The PHP runtime will pars en execute our .php files and outputs the HTML (or anything you want) back to you.