What? Linode offers a cheap Linux machine for as low as $5 USD. Blazor offers a lightweight binary messaging client-server framework for as low as 3 bytes per update. I am tired of Azure for simple things. Why? I used to pack and push a docker image to Heroku with Blazor Server and was very proud of myself. Earlier in 2022, Heroku shut down their free tier. In my opinion, good riddance to sad rubbish....
I just added some code to get a working screen saver project with Visual Studio Code debugging support (remotely!) that can talk to a REST api to Github. Check it out: https://github.com/bitobrian/Roku-Screen-Saver-RESTful-VSCode-Debug-Template I’ll post a follow-up some time on the caveats of Roku app development. It has a difficult learning curve but is relatively straight forward once you get into it. Now someone just needs to write an abstraction over it in a decent framework....
My $0.02 Heroku is great. You can deploy a concept for free and the next highest tier is a few bucks away. When you’re ready to go to scale, it’s ready and prorated to the second. Neat. Docker is great. You can build, test, and deploy in any configuration on a local stack. Everything is ephemeral awesome. .NET Core is great. I can write great apps with the framework I prefer and not be stuck on Windows....