Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Defining ASP.NET Core Controller action constraint to match the correct action

When developing Web Api controllers many times we have situations where we need to define similar arguments in different methods. For example, a controller that has 2 methods that query users either by last name or date of birth. The name of the method is different but they both will receive a single argument of type string. When the routing engine can’t determine which action method it should call, a status code of 500 is returned.

Deploy Azure Quickstarts to Azure Government

In this post, Application Development Manager, Marcus Fernandez, covers using existing Azure templates with the Azure Government cloud. (image) Some great resources have been developed by the ALM Rangers, MVPs, and Microsoft Product Groups around Azure Quickstarts. Great place to get started should you need a pre-baked infrastructure. ...

Exam prep for Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions, 70-534

In this post, App Dev Manager, Omer Amin talks about preparing for the Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions Exam. (image) So you are thinking about taking the 534 exam, Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions. There are plenty of exam prep resources and courses out there from Udemy\Pluralsight courses, books, guides, etc. Search ...

DevOps for GIS

This article is from Premier Developer consultant Ron Vincent. DevOps is more and more becoming mainstream. We are seeing it being broadly adopted across all industries and technology fields. We are also seeing the technology field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) adopt DevOps but not as quickly as it could. This article will address ...

Should you obfuscate your Xamarin app?

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

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

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

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

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. (image) 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 ...

Hardening your web server’s SSL /TLS ciphers

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 ...