Andrew Wilson's Blog

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Bicep Tips and Tricks | #8 | Agnostic Templates Through Config Files

Overview Building on our previous exploration of Typed Variables, today we’re diving into one of my favorite patterns for creating maintainable and reusable Bicep templates: the Shared Variable File Pattern. This approach transforms your templates from being tightly coupled to specific …

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Bicep Tips and Tricks | #7 | From Static to Dynamic Config

Overview One of my core goals when writing IaC templates is ensuring reusability of common components, resources, and in this case, configuration. More often than not, I see configuration that is broadly common between resources (except for one or two properties) being duplicated throughout …

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Bicep Tips and Tricks | #6 | Typed Variables

Overview In late May this year, an exciting but semi overlooked feature was released, and I absolutely love it - Typed Variables! Prior to this release, variable types were inferred through the value, which is fine for most statically defined content within a template, but there are cases that I …

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Bicep Tips and Tricks | #5 | From Documentation to Deployment-Time Validation: Conditional Parameter Requirements

Overview In Bicep templates, we sometimes encounter scenarios where certain parameters should be mandatory based on the value of another parameter. For example, when deploying to production environments, you might require additional configuration parameters that are optional for development …

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Bicep Tips and Tricks | #4 | Shared Variables

Overview This week is a simple one, but works wonders in maintainability and consistency. There are often cases where you will need to define static values that don’t change frequently, if at all, and more importantly, you seem to be setting these up frequently for multiple templates. Here are …

Posted by Andrew Wilson on Wednesday, August 6, 2025

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Andrew Wilson
Husband - Father - Microsoft Azure MVP - Chief Consulting Officer @ Black Marble

Has a passion for creating software [especially solution integrations] that help others execute their jobs faster and more efficiently.

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