Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Accessibility Testing with Azure DevOps Pipelines

I was recently working with one of my customers to help them improve the usability of their applications as mandated by their IT staff. The goal was to create quality web applications that can be equally useful to all users including those with disabilities. Together, we reviewed many good tools and potential best practices, but we wanted something that would specifically run as part of the application release process.

Hosting Python packages in Azure DevOps

What I wanted to accomplish here was simply to create a redistributable Python package. Also show some of the practices on how to work with Python in a Windows environment, but I could not stop there. I went ahead and built a complete CI/CD pipeline for the package, showing how easy it is and how well Python projects integrate with Azure DevOps.

DevOps and Culture, part 1

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is a great introduction to how we think about DevOps and in this article, I’m going to unpack this statement so that we have a bit more context. This is the first part of multiple articles on culture as it relates to DevOps.

Beyond “Lift-and-Shift”: Application Modernization with Microsoft Azure

The "lift-and-shift" approach with Azure IaaS can only deliver on small measure of the promise of agility and innovation in the Cloud when compared to modernized application (i.e., Cloud-optimized). Modernizing application with Azure PaaS, on the other hand, can deliver on the promise of agility and innovation to a great extent. It reduces the time required to manage the application and the time required to deploy a new release, and optimizes the speed to market.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps monitoring strategy

Both Flow and PowerApps are great tools that can be in the hands of business and power users to accelerate the building of automated workflows and business apps across on-premise and the cloud services. It’s easy to see how there could be many such Flows and Apps built, deployed and running within your tenant. It’s a best practice for the IT administrators to devise a monitoring strategy in place that could proactively keep a watch on these Flows, Apps and other related resources and alert and perform remediation actions as necessary.