Well, once again I’ve fallen off of the blogging wagon. And once again I am now getting back on said aforementioned wagon. Let’s try and make this a more regular thing than once a year or so, shall we?

I recently built a quick little hobby site / side project with .NET Core MVC. I have a lot of experience with ASP.NET MVC but I was totally new to .NET Core MVC. As a result, I had to teach myself the new ways of doing old things.

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.