Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

May 2017 - Developer Support

Should you obfuscate your Xamarin app?

May 30, 2017 May 30, 2017 05/30/17
Pam Lahoud
This blog on securing your source code is from Premier Developer consultant Bill Reiss. I saw a question recently about how to protect code in a Xamarin app package. I feel the first question is whether you need to, and not how to do it. The reality is that you can never completely protect your app code, and if someone wants your code bad ...

A higher level of Premier Support for Developers – Premier Mission Critical

May 28, 2017 May 28, 2017 05/28/17
Developer Support
In this post, Sr. Application Development Manager, Wyn Lewis-Bevan spotlights Premier Mission Critical Support. So, you have a multi-million-dollar revenue generator that uses Microsoft supported technologies, either on Premise, in the Azure cloud, or both. Because it generates a significant portion of your company’s revenue and is ...

TFS automation – User management

May 27, 2017 May 27, 2017 05/27/17
Developer Support
In this post, Sr. Application Development Manager, Nandu Muralidharan introduces the TFS API set to help automate administrative tasks associated with managing users in Team Foundation Server. He also shares a set of helper components that he authored to assist developers in this space.   You can check out Nandu’s blog here. This is...

Using Application Insights SDK in Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) style with .NET

May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017 05/26/17
Pam Lahoud
This is the second post in a series on the Application Insights SDK from Premier Developer consultant Nasir Syed.  Check out his previous post here. In my previous post I talked about using Custom Attributes to avoid repetition, code pollution etc., and illustrated it from a very high level to use with Application Insights API, custom ...

Managed object internals, Part 1. The layout

May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017 05/26/17
Sergey Tepliakov
The layout of a managed object is pretty simple: a managed object contains instance data, a pointer to a meta-data (a.k.a. method table pointer) and a bag of internal information also known as an object header. The first time I’ve read about it, I’ve got a question: why the layout of an object is so weird? Why a managed reference ...

Hardening your web server’s SSL /TLS ciphers

May 25, 2017 May 25, 2017 05/25/17
Developer Support
In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Anand Shukla shares some tips to harden your web server’s SSL/TLS ciphers. I recently worked with a customer who had security requirements to disable the weak RC 4 ciphers from their Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 servers.  The process is little different for Windows 2008 R2 ...

Avoiding Code Pollution when using Application Insights SDK

May 24, 2017 May 24, 2017 05/24/17
Pam Lahoud
This post comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Nasir Syed. “Insert a few lines of code in your application to find out what users are doing with it, or to help diagnose issues. You can send telemetry from device and desktop apps, web clients, and web servers. Use the Azure Application Insights core telemetry API to send custom ...

DevOps diversité & inclusion

May 23, 2017 May 23, 2017 05/23/17
Developer Support
Premier Support for Developers is available in various regions worldwide.  Representing our Canadian team, Application Development Manager, Adlene Sifi, provides our first French post on DevOps Diversity and Inclusion. Malgré les années, il demeure difficile de définir clairement ce qu'est DevOps. À la base DevOps était défini ...

Practical Git Commands Kickstart

May 22, 2017 May 22, 2017 05/22/17
Pam Lahoud
This very useful guide to Git commands comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Crystal Tenn. Git command line is extremely useful for managing your resources – it is the only way to utilize all Git commands possible as most GUI’s only have a set of available commands. Although many guides exist to explain Git command line, many are...

Monitoring, and Why It Should Come First In Your DevOps Strategy!

May 20, 2017 May 20, 2017 05/20/17
Developer Support
Senior Application Development Manager, Dave Harrison, spotlights the importance of instrumentation and metrics as the backbone of your DevOps movement.  Monitoring has long been the secret sauce of DevOps. How else do we get feedback on our priorities, and actual metrics – not guesses – on which features are in use? What’s often ...