Recently in CodeSession I encountered the following logged warning:

No XML encryptor configured. Key {6848a46f-d0d6-49a6-b035-0f30f5448f9d} may be persisted to storage in unencrypted form.

This was totally new to me, so I started Googling. There I learned all about .NET Core’s Data Protection API.

After reading the MS docs, this was still confusing. The documentation states that this API is used for things like .NET Authorization, but CodeSession doesn’t use that functionality. So why was this happening?

In this post I’d like to show you how I ported an Azure Classic Cloud Service application (which cost me $16 USD a month by the way) to a .NET Core Azure Function, and now host it in Azure for $0 a month! That’s right - Azure Functions are both awesome and (usually) free!

Introducing realDonaldTron

So back in late 2016, when our dear leader was elected president, I decided to have a little fun at his expense. I created a Twitter account and generated API keys. I then created an Azure Classic Cloud Service and wrote a quick and dirty Twitter bot. This bot consumes 1000s of the most recent tweets from Donald Trump, cleans up his grammar and punctuation a little (because he can’t write words good), generates a Markov Chain

from the Tweets, and then schedules a .NET Timer to generate and publish a new Tweet at the top of every hour.