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.

CaveRace is a classic maze-based video game I developed back in 1997 with some other students. Inspired on a game, I played on my Commodore Amiga, called Dyna Blaster (Bomberman).

Forest level	Winter level	Lava level

Download

You can download the 16-bit MS-DOS version of CaveRace (version 1.2) here.

There are many libraries and services to generate PDF files for asp.net core web applications. There are excellent commercial solutions out there, but if you need a free solution, it gets harder. Some libraries are hard to use, or others are limited in functionality. I need a free, easy to use, and quick solution to generate PDF files on an Azure Web App.

Can a View retrun a PDF?

What I need is a View that returns a PDF and not HTML what it usually does. The beauty of using a standard View is that I can use my web and asp.net core knowledge to design the View. In this case, I need to generate invoices.

When connecting to the UniFi Cloud Key Controller, you need to know the IP-address and port number (default 8443). In my situation, the IP-address is 192.168.1.64

If you do not know your Cloud Key IP-address, use the Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool.

The connection is using https (that’s good), but there is no domain name, so the default SSL certificate triggers a security warning in your web browser because it can’t be verified. Also, the web browser will not remember your login credentials for the next login.

Most websites don’t need a dynamically generated page for every visitor; it is slow, expensive, and requires continuous updates to be secure. A static site is fast and reliable. I hear you thinking; this is old school, most websites are interactive and are using a CMS in some kind to manage their content.

Headless CMS

The solution for a static website is to make use of a headless CMS, like Hugo or Jekyll. Basascly, you generate a static site from content and a template, similar to what this blog is doing.