Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Cost Saving on Azure DevTest Lab

Azure DevTest Lab is a SaaS offering by Microsoft that empowers development team to stand up a fully functional dev/test environment in a matter of minutes. Check out the documentation and quick-start tutorial on how to get started today! See docs for more information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/lab-services/lab-services-overview

Azure SQL MI Replication – New Possibilities for Hybrid Environments

As customers continue to have more applications deployed in Azure, it’s common that data from those on-premises applications has to be shared with the new cloud applications or vise-versa. A simple batched methodology may be suitable for table data that is rarely updated, but for data that changes frequently, this may introduce an unacceptably high latency and undermine any data concurrency, expected by the business users. One of the limitations of SQL Azure database is that it can’t support a SQL agent, so replication, while possible from on-premises to the cloud, is not available in the opposite direction. One solution is the use of the relatively new Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, SQL MI, that allows replication from the cloud replicated back to an on-premises SQL database.

Business-Driven Digital Transformation with Azure and Azure DevOps

Business-driven development (BDD) is a methodology in which business decisions and requirements drive an IT solution. Without adequate business needs identified, development cannot begin. Business-driven digital transformation is taking this a step further and having a company embrace a larger change, and therefore improve from it. The scale of digital transformation is of a larger magnitude, and it relies on buy-in of all business folks, as well as the IT department.

Testing Online Connectivity in PowerApps

This post will walk through testing the Connection.Connected property in your PowerApps. If you are building a PowerApp with offline capabilities, then it becomes very important to test whether the device has an active internet connection. The sensor function Connection.Connected can be used to test for connectivity – if true, you are connected, false not so much. A common scenario is to check the result of this function in an OnSelect formula. If connected, write or submit to a live data source, if disconnected, write to local collection for submittal later.

My Experience Starting a FIRST LEGO League Jr. Team

Programs, like FIRST, are important because they are creating the next generation of leaders and doers. Through the programs, the kids learn to work together to make the world a better place. If I can make a difference with just one kid, then I feel I have accomplished my goal of helping shape our future leaders make the world a better place.

Dynamics 365 Implementation Pt. 1 – Methodology

Over the course of the next 3 blog posts in my Dynamics 365 implementation series, I will go over the process and experiences my client had with implementing an ERP solution for their 50 year old, multi-billion dollar company. This first post will explain the implementation process used for this successful rollout of Dynamics 365.

Azure Automation DSC via ARM Template

One of the challenges was figuring out a way to get the commercial software installed and configured on the virtual machines in a completely automated fashion, which is where Azure Automation DSC fit into the solution. DSC or Desired State Configuration is not a new concept, but I recently learned that Azure Automation can be used as a DSC pull server that hosts your DSC configurations and resources in a convenient location.

Compliance, Auditors, and Documentation Oh My!

Azure Trust Center should be your first destination for our compliance offerings. Did you know independent audit reports along with Azure compliance offerings can be found there? This documentation is a free, but protected resource for those that utilize Microsoft cloud services (Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, etc.). Compliance documentation for HITrust, HIPPA/HITECH, FedRAMP, CSA CCM and many others are stored here.

PowerApps Reusable Components

In this post, I’ll show you how to create reusable canvas components for your PowerApps. For this example, I’m going to create a control to display today’s date, visualized as one of those daily tear-off calendars you might have seen at some point on someone’s desk. Since the component will be reusable on multiple screens, I’ll add properties to the control to set the data and visual configurations. I’ll also show how to use relative sizing to scale the controls when the component is resized, and how to scale font sizes as well.