Lately I’ve been exploring the new possibilities opened up by Azure Event Grid, which was introduced last month.

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed platform for publishing and subscribing to event notifications. It is intended to ultimately encompass all Azure services as event publishers and/or subscribers but it also allows for custom, non-Azure participants. At this point, the following publishers and handlers are available:

For a little bit of background information on how AEG relates to the other event offerings on Azure, such and Event Hub or Service Bus, see this write-up by Saravana Kumar.

Long story short: it all looks very promising, but since most Azure services are yet to be hooked up to Event Grid the custom topic publishers and WebHook subscribers may hold the most promise for the short term.

So I tried my hand at actually getting that to work with a console app for publishing and a ASP.NET Core WebAPI for handling; code is available here.

In general, it’s relatively straightforward. The only thing that took me some time to get right is the handling of the validation process. The issue was that the documentation says that the validation request contains a header ‘Event-Key’ with a value of ‘Validation’. In actuality, this is ‘aeg-event-key’ with value ‘SubscriptionValidation’. Since my API is routing the validation request to a special action based on the header, this is pretty relevant. But, let’s keep in mind that Event Grid is in preview at this point, and the documentation is part of that status.