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Disable gzip responses in Azure Functions

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By default, responses from Http Triggered Azure Functions are gzipped: Not all clients are able to handle this (although they should be) Turning it off isn’t particularly trivial. A change needs to be made to applicationhost.config – which is located in LocalSiteRoot/Config However, this file is readonly, so the change needs to be made via a xdt transform. In the Azure portal...

A Seller On Amazon Offered Me An Incentive To Leave A 5* Review

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I buy a lot on Amazon. Probably too much. I enjoy the convenience, pricing (mostly) and reviews. Reviews, however, have to be looked at carefully. Some sellers, particularly new sellers (or selling new products) offer incentives for 5* reviews. I knew this practice happened, but I’d never experienced it first hand. I recently bought a product on Amazon, with a smattering of 5* reviews. I...

Some products on Amazon cost MORE on Amazon Prime, Even For Prime Members!

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Earlier today I was looking to purchase an item on Amazon. (2x VonHaus Vertical Wall Mount Bike Cycle Storage Hooks to be specific) I found them for £7.99 – available next day, on Prime. However, I noticed it was available £1 less in the “other sellers” bit. Curious, I took a look: Both same product Both same vendor Prime was however £1 more. This was despite me being a Prime...

Better assertions when verifying Moq’d methods have been called

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Man wearing fake glasses and moustache

Moq, according to its GitHub page, is “The most popular and friendly mocking framework for .NET”. Mocking frameworks allow you to create a ‘fake’ version of a dependency (typically an interface, or abstract class). With this fake, you can then instruct the methods return values, or invoke behaviour. Alternatively you can assert the methods were called, with a certain set...

Reversing hashes of PwnedPasswords api using number of breaches

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I was recently working on a requirement to log the number of breached sites a password appeared on when customers were registering (if that password had been breached at all) Importantly, we are not logging the breached password itself (nor the hash of the password) – just the number of breaches that particular password appeared in (as per the Pwned Passwords data set) So, to log this, I’m...