Building the business of tomorrow with developers today
March 23, 2020Mar 23, 202003/23/20With GitHub and Azure DevOps you have a powerful combination of tools to help you develop world class applications where you are an open source or enterprise developer.
March 22, 2020Mar 22, 202003/22/20Working effectively as remote teams has never been more critical. Remote work brings significant challenges to development teams, especially as more and more organizations place a premium on working remotely.
March 20, 2020Mar 20, 202003/20/20There are situations where people would like to have a comprehensive view of the feature comparison. Instead of digging into every feature across all three platform, I compiled a list of name spaces in each platform and put them side by side so you can easily see the differences.
March 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.
March 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.
March 17, 2020Mar 17, 202003/17/20This post will give an example of creating a callout in SharePoint. The gd-sprest library was recently updated to include the SharePoint Callout Manager helper class, which we will be using for this example.
March 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.
March 13, 2020Mar 13, 202003/13/20In this post, Premier Consultant Tim Omta explains how to migrate from SQL CE to SQL Azure.
March 12, 2020Mar 12, 202003/12/20In this post, App Dev Manager Andy Moore shows how to create cross-organizational reports for Azure DevOps with Power BI.
When using Azure DevOps to manage teams, backlogs, work items and bugs there are tools available for quick reporting and understanding of the current state of the project.
March 11, 2020Mar 11, 202003/11/20In this multi-part series, App Dev Manager Jon Guerin and Premier Consultant Daniel Taylor (@dbabulldog) lays out some best practices around setting up and using In-Memory OLTP.
AI
January 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20In this blog, I will demonstrate how Text Analytics API Version 3 Preview of the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services can be used to analyze large unstructured data. This analysis aims to understand the sentiments expressed in a solicited public comment process and determines the degree of the positivity or negativity of the comments.
December 18, 2019Dec 18, 201912/18/19Whether you’re just starting off in tech, building, managing, or deploying apps, gathering and analyzing data, or solving global issues —anyone can benefit from using cloud technology. In this post, we will explore some practical examples where Azure AI is driving innovation.
October 4, 2019Oct 4, 201910/4/19Where would you find all three (AI, ML and DS) at work? The most common place today is in autonomous driving vehicles. All three disciplines work together to help train an algorithm to recognize obstacles (MS), then to provide real-time actions (AI) to the vehicle, all based on large amounts of information that data science (DS) can analyze.
August 26, 2019Aug 26, 201908/26/19Translating text can be tricky business. Sure, by using online services and tools, you can quickly find out how to say “Hello”, "that dog is green", and “where’s the closest taco stand?” But what about when the conversation needs to be more contextual and specific to your company/business/audience?
June 21, 2019Jun 21, 201906/21/19Application Development Manager Rich Maines explores the art of the possible with AI in the context of Microsoft services and the ethical principles that we believe should drive the development of AI.
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19From the ready-to-consume set of Azure Cognitive Services to the comprehensive set of tools for data scientists available in Azure Machine Learning Service, there are many ways to apply AI into your products and services.
September 4, 2018Sep 4, 201809/4/18
Microsoft’s vision is to democratize AI and make it accessible and valuable to everyone. Join us to learn how to start building intelligence into your solutions with the Microsoft AI platform, including pre-trained AI services like Cognitive Services and Bot Framework, as well as deep learning tools like Azure Machine Learning.
May 25, 2018May 25, 201805/25/18In this post, Consultant/App. Dev. Manager Timothy Baillis explains how AI and Bots can improve modern UI designs.
It has been said that every great developer is inherently lazy- or at least inspired by boring or repetitive tasks. The idea that you can code a program to automate a task or overcome an obstacle is a powerful incentive to create.
April 23, 2018Apr 23, 201804/23/18In this post, Principal Consultant/ADM Larry Duff discuss some ethical challenges in Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has been a dream of computer scientists for many years. I remember my early days of programming I had a Commodore Pet. I was excited that I had a book of programs,
February 13, 2018Feb 13, 201802/13/18Ever wondered how to integrate speech and AI into your application? It’s easy with this tutorial from Premier Developer consultants Adel Ghabboun and Kunal Sinha!
Have you ever wondered what are some of the technologies behind personal home assistants such as Cortana,
ALM
April 4, 2020Apr 4, 202004/4/20Using Azure Devops can help your team adopt modern software engineering methodologies with the use of forks and they by applying Inner Source techniques within your organization that will encourage code sharing, code reuse and shared development.
March 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20One of the biggest mistakes I see in any project is the development team failing to get outside feedback. Whether project teams wait until the very end of a project to reach our or they don’t get feedback at all, these teams are missing out on one of the best sources of information to help build a better solution.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
March 23, 2020Mar 23, 202003/23/20With GitHub and Azure DevOps you have a powerful combination of tools to help you develop world class applications where you are an open source or enterprise developer.
March 12, 2020Mar 12, 202003/12/20In this post, App Dev Manager Andy Moore shows how to create cross-organizational reports for Azure DevOps with Power BI.
When using Azure DevOps to manage teams, backlogs, work items and bugs there are tools available for quick reporting and understanding of the current state of the project.
February 21, 2020Feb 21, 202002/21/20Successfully delivering valuable functionality in the first sprint or three can be difficult, and for some, simply impossible. But the lessons learned from the attempt are invaluable! Taking an early hit, failing in the short term is unimportant if it improves the chance of success in the long run.
February 20, 2020Feb 20, 202002/20/20Asking these questions during sprint planning is a great way to start a conversation that will both achieve the principles of collaboration and engagement, and ensure a greater understanding of the value that the product is expected to deliver to its users.
December 19, 2019Dec 19, 201912/19/19GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.
December 17, 2019Dec 17, 201912/17/19The DevOps Handbook describes the aspects of working toward a satisfying result for a customer while handling apparently conflicting goals within the organization. The book explains through case studies how companies have resolved the apparent contradictions, aligning everyone’s goals can bring about greater rewards and process improvements.
November 1, 2019Nov 1, 201911/1/19We all know that automated testing is a key component of a successful DevOps practice. However, it’s also common for organizations to underestimate the change effort required to create a complete testing strategy. In this blog post we are going to demonstrate the advantages of creating a clear automated testing strategy, in three simple steps
Angular
March 29, 2020Mar 29, 202003/29/20Application Insights is an Azure service for monitoring web applications. It includes analytics tools to help you understand application usage and to diagnose issues with the goal of continuously improving performance and usability.
July 22, 2019Jul 22, 201907/22/19Find out how to integrate Application Insights into your Angular SPA and track custom metrics such as Page Views and Load Time. You will also learn how instrument Angular apps with Application Insights with some best practice guidance.
April 24, 2019Apr 24, 201904/24/19The updated Angular project template in Visual Studio 2019 (and 2017 before that) provides a convenient starting point for ASP.NET Core apps using Angular and the Angular CLI to implement a rich, client-side user interface (UI). The template is equivalent to creating an ASP.NET Core project to act as an API backend and an Angular CLI project to act as a UI.
April 17, 2019Apr 17, 201904/17/19A common question from developers building Single Page Applications is how to hide proprietary calculations or other logic from end users. The answer is always to move that logic out of the JavaScript running in the browser and onto a server, which leads to building and hosting an API service. However, in the new world of serverless computing, there is a simpler option. Azure Functions is a compute service that enables you to run code on-demand without the hassle of building an entire application or managing any infrastructure.
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18In an agile development environment, there may be partially completed features or features with external dependencies that are not ready. Instead of relying on multiple code branches, instead you may opt for deploying code with a feature turned off. Later, that feature should be turned on via a configuration or database change. This post provides sample code that you can use to implement feature flags in your Angular app.
October 24, 2018Oct 24, 201810/24/18This is an update post to a previous article published in April 2017 explaining how to wrap ADAL.js with Angular2+. The previous article is no longer relevant given the changes to the Angular framework. This new post explains a reimplementation which uses the PathLocationStrategy and Angular features such as HttpInterceptor and InjectionToken.
March 7, 2018Mar 7, 201803/7/18Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Consultant, shows us how to customize the behavior of an Angular app based on the user’s permissions. This includes page navigation, hiding and disabling of UI elements, and generation of menus.
Applications often include requirements to customize their appearance and behavior based on the user’s role or permission.
March 1, 2018Mar 1, 201803/1/18This post provides the steps and code samples for using a JSON configuration file, which can be customized for multiple environments.
June 14, 2017Jun 14, 201706/14/17Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Senior Consultant, A few tweaks are necessary to take an Angular app and move it to IIS. Here is a list of changes required to get everything running smoothly.
Using the Angular-CLI to generate an Angular SPA is an excellent way to scaffold out a well-organized application.
May 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17Laurie Atkinson, Senior Premier Developer Consultant, outlines the steps and pieces you need to add logging and telemetry to an Angular SPA using Application Insights.
*There was an updated follow-up to this article on 3/29/20– Be sure and see Angular How-to: Add Application Insights to an Angular SPA.
Async
October 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18 ... when used with async/await.
TaskCompletionSource
September 5, 2018Sep 5, 201809/5/18One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior.
February 14, 2018Feb 14, 201802/14/18The async series
Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.
Almost every non-trivial behavior of the async methods in C# can be explained based on one user scenario: migration of the existing synchronous code to asynchronous should be as simple as possible.
February 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code, kudos to you.
Availability
November 9, 2018Nov 9, 201811/9/18In a previous post I discussed an approach to handling backend redundancy using Azure API Manager (APIM). In this post I want to discuss the various options for providing a high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to your services exposed by API Manager.
Azure
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Telemetry Processor is a plug-ins that can be ingested in your application to customize how telemetry can be processed before it’s sent to the Application Insights service such as filtering out telemetry, replace or discard a telemetry item, etc.
April 2, 2020Apr 2, 202004/2/20With microservice architecture being as popular as it is today, being able to Mock your services makes it easy to get all your developers coding right away. We no longer have to wait for backend services to be completely developed or spend time coding throw away responses to provide our calling applications.
April 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.
April 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20We decided on another great Azure Resource, the Azure Durable Function, because we wanted to provide SharePoint a custom status that could be leveraged for a progress bar, we also had the need to build a separate function that had a workflow that could span hours or even days.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20This retail customer was able to implement a critical business work-from-home policy using Azure VDI pools, auto-scale capacity on-demand to meet dynamic usage requirements, exploit existing Azure Active Directory and Azure ExpressRoute investments to provide seamless access to corporate compute services.
March 27, 2020Mar 27, 202003/27/20I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Robert Vettor, a Premier Developer consultant who specializes in microservices and cloud native architecture. Robert’s in the process of writing a great book on “Architecting Cloud-Native .NET Apps for Azure” which is available now in a preview version.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
March 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.
C#
March 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.
January 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.
January 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.
January 17, 2020Jan 17, 202001/17/20In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to run Blazor Components in existing ASP.NET Core MVC apps.
September 27, 2019Sep 27, 201909/27/19As a cloud developer, I increasingly encounter projects that involves Go. Azure services such as AKS, Blockchain, Terraform, and supporting technologies such as Helm are all heavily Go. In addition, Go is a first-class citizen on Azure as all core PaaS SDKs offer Go libraries. In this post, let's compare Go and C# key concepts.
September 20, 2019Sep 20, 201909/20/19Building applications operating in the internet environment requires understanding of options available for performing authentication and authorization. These options include, both a variety of protocols such as OAuth2 and WS-Federation, as well as tools and toolkits such as Azure AD, AD FS and ADAL.
September 6, 2019Sep 6, 201909/6/19In this post, App Dev Manager Isaac Levin showcase the versatility of Azure Function with a solution that updates his Blog via Email.
I have blogged about the changes I made to streamline my site architecture and continue to work on ways to improve it.
August 23, 2019Aug 23, 201908/23/19ML.NET enables developers to implement machine learning tasks like classification, regression, clustering, and recommendation ... etc. In this post, I will show you how to get started with ML.NET implementing permutation feature importance for employee attrition.
August 21, 2019Aug 21, 201908/21/19The intended audience for this blog post is one who wants to migrate from the full .Net Framework to .NET Core and has a large library of WCFs, now considered technical debt. This post will attempt to at least partially answer the question: How difficult will it be to migrate my current code base of WCFs to gRPC in .NET Core?
July 24, 2019Jul 24, 201907/24/19In this post, you will see practical examples on how to version Logic Apps and Function Apps for breaking and non-breaking changes with common API versioning schemes and related techniques such as API gateway pattern.
Code reviews
September 5, 2018Sep 5, 201809/5/18One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior.
Community
January 7, 2020Jan 7, 202001/7/20Premier Developer Consultants, Ashley Shorter & Tamar Zamba, describe the experiences, challenges, and lessons of going from undergrad to Microsoft Consultant.
October 16, 2019Oct 16, 201910/16/19Check out the innovative ways to use Python with Excel from a recent community Meetup event in NYC.
June 15, 2019Jun 15, 201906/15/19We experienced many different emotions with what seemed like a daunting task. What made it less daunting, the facilitators reminded us, was that we are not alone - we are team - so, leverage each other.
May 23, 2019May 23, 201905/23/19Learn how to organize and run your own successful Hour of Code learning events.
April 10, 2019Apr 10, 201904/10/19Programs, 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.
Concurrency
January 5, 2017Jan 5, 201701/5/17In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance.
I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap,
December 20, 2016Dec 20, 201612/20/16I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and the thread pool will do its best to maximize application throughput by using optimal number of threads that will process the input data.
Data
January 15, 2020Jan 15, 202001/15/20Azure API for FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) enables rapid exchange of data through FHIR APIs, backed by a managed Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) offering in the cloud. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist Protected Health Information PHI in the cloud.
January 14, 2020Jan 14, 202001/14/20How do you refresh Power BI datasets in the Power BI service from Azure SQL server resources while restricting traffic to specific resources? Learn how using the On-Premises Data Gateway and SQL endpoints can help you tighten security.
December 30, 2019Dec 30, 201912/30/19 Monitoring our systems is key to a healthy, predictable, and stable environment. Learn how Azure Monitor helps simplify monitoring of Azure solutions including data platforms such as Azure SQL.
December 29, 2019Dec 29, 201912/29/19Learn how to prevent the DACPAC from rebuilding all objects that once participated in transactional replication and have no changes in development.
October 16, 2019Oct 16, 201910/16/19Check out the innovative ways to use Python with Excel from a recent community Meetup event in NYC.
May 31, 2019May 31, 201905/31/19With tools such as Postman, you can easily send HTTP requests to your APIs. This technique can help test the fields that are being added to the integration message to see if they pass or fail. This helps in the efforts to test if the integration message being sent will successfully get posted in Dynamics 365.
May 28, 2019May 28, 201905/28/19When it comes to data, there is never a thing as too much security. With identify theft and breaches becoming a daily occurrence, ensuring sensitive information is protected is essential to business. Microsoft Azure has been designed from the ground-up to be one of the most secure places to store your information. Let me prove it!
May 27, 2019May 27, 201905/27/19Throughout a typical Dynamics project, various environments are setup to prevent the existing environments from being affected by the changes being pushed to an environment. This is the model most firms follow when they have mastered the release sequence in their CI/CD.
April 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19One of the best practices with containers is not to persist data inside the containers for long term as containers are ephermal. These containers can be removed and rebuilt very often and may require storage that persists across pods beyond the application lifecycle. In this blog post, we will learn about how to create Persistent Volumes in AKS with Azure Files.
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19In this post, App Dev Manager Shany Wiesel explains the different deployment models for Apache Cassandra on Azure.
Microsoft Azure is an open cloud platform that runs both Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft software which includes operating systems, application servers, messaging middleware as well as SQL and NoSQL databases from both commercial and open source models.
Development
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20Xaml Islands enables developers to enhance the look, feel and functionality of legacy Win32 C++ or WPF apps using UWP controls without having to do a complete rewrite. Xaml islands also offers the ability to leverage new UI controls on specific parts of the app so you can modernize at your own pace.
March 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20One of the biggest mistakes I see in any project is the development team failing to get outside feedback. Whether project teams wait until the very end of a project to reach our or they don’t get feedback at all, these teams are missing out on one of the best sources of information to help build a better solution.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.
March 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.
March 22, 2020Mar 22, 202003/22/20Working effectively as remote teams has never been more critical. Remote work brings significant challenges to development teams, especially as more and more organizations place a premium on working remotely.
March 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.
March 11, 2020Mar 11, 202003/11/20In this multi-part series, App Dev Manager Jon Guerin and Premier Consultant Daniel Taylor (@dbabulldog) lays out some best practices around setting up and using In-Memory OLTP.
March 5, 2020Mar 5, 202003/5/20Technical Debt can be defined as as “the concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) and faster solution now instead of a using a better approach that would take longer”
DevOps
April 4, 2020Apr 4, 202004/4/20Using Azure Devops can help your team adopt modern software engineering methodologies with the use of forks and they by applying Inner Source techniques within your organization that will encourage code sharing, code reuse and shared development.
March 26, 2020Mar 26, 202003/26/20As demonstrated above I was able to drop the build time from 5m 10s to 2m 34s which is roughly a 50% reduction in build time. This is a significant saving especially when you factor in the fact that you will run the build several times a day. This can quickly add up to hours of saved build time each day.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
March 23, 2020Mar 23, 202003/23/20With GitHub and Azure DevOps you have a powerful combination of tools to help you develop world class applications where you are an open source or enterprise developer.
March 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.
March 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.
March 6, 2020Mar 6, 202003/6/20Le DevOps Dojo: Ceinture blanche contient huit modules, chacun aligné sur les concepts clés DevOps tels que l’intégration continue, la sécurité continue, la planification continue et autres.
March 6, 2020Mar 6, 202003/6/20The DevOps Dojo: White Belt contains eight modules, each aligned to key DevOps concepts such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Security, Continuous Planning, and others.
March 6, 2020Mar 6, 202003/6/20“DevOps Dojo: Cinta Blanca” contiene ocho módulos, cada uno alineado con conceptos clave de DevOps como integración continua, seguridad continua, planeación continua y otros.
March 5, 2020Mar 5, 202003/5/20Technical Debt can be defined as as “the concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) and faster solution now instead of a using a better approach that would take longer”
ErrorProne.NET
May 3, 2018May 3, 201805/3/18As you may know from my previous posts “The ‘in’-modifier and the readonly structs in C#” and “Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#”, structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in “readonly”
Events
May 2, 2019May 2, 201905/2/19Microsoft Build is set to kick off next week from May 6-8. As a developer, this is not an event you want to miss. Build sets the stage for what is to come from Microsoft in the months ahead-- announcements, strategy, and technology innovation that will shift the landscape.
September 28, 2017Sep 28, 201709/28/17In this post, Senior App Dev Managers, Latha Natarajan and Sujith Nair reflect on some of the improvements and announcements from Build 2017 that made it even easier to enable your cloud transformation. If you have been meaning to review the buzz from build,
May 12, 2017May 12, 201705/12/17ADM’s Bill Bevan, Marty Donovan, Russ Clark, Joseph Flanigen, joined Garrett Jacobs (Services Market Strategy Director) representing Premier Developer @ BUILD 2017.
With another exciting Microsoft Build conference coming to a close, we’re inspired for the future, working with our partners on innovative solutions impacting the world.
May 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17Developers from around the world came together this week as our Build Conference kicked off in Seattle. It’s always an inspiring time to hear new product announcements and seeing many new technologies in action for the first time. Build is sensory overload to anyone who loves technology,
August 4, 2016Aug 4, 201608/4/16In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Neal Champion shares an overview of the UK Dev Briefing Day. This annual event typically runs in the spring of each year, covering up-to-date presentations on the latest tools and development capabilities for the Microsoft platform.
March 29, 2016Mar 29, 201603/29/16Microsoft continues to focus on enabling developers to do amazing work as businesses and industries transform in support of the shift to a cloud-first, mobile-first world. At Build 2016 we will present the latest tools and technologies and how they can help today’s developers be their most creative and productive.
October 14, 2015Oct 14, 201510/14/15Microsoft HoloLens devices will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2016. Apply now to help develop the future of holographic computing.
Hololens Development Edition (Apply Here)
Prerequisites
You are a developer in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada where the Development Edition will first be available.
October 8, 2015Oct 8, 201510/8/15This week marked one of the most amazing demonstrations of Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 and connected devices. There has simply never been a more exciting time to be a developer.
Watch the event here!
May 4, 2015May 4, 201505/4/15Whether you’re a senior decision maker, IT professional or enterprise developer, you’ll be inspired by our vision of where technology is headed. Tailor your learning experience in this one-of-a-kind conference designed to fuel your business and give you a glimpse into the future.
April 29, 2015Apr 29, 201504/29/15It may take some time to process all of the game changing announcements that came out of the BUILD keynote today. If you missed it, be sure and check out the on-demand recording here.
Satya framed up the road forward to build an intelligent cloud,
GC
May 9, 2017May 9, 201705/9/17Here is a seemingly simple question for you: Is it possible that the CLR will call a finalizer for an instance when an instance method is still running? In other words, is it possible in the following case to see ‘Finalizing instance.’ before ‘Finished doing something.’?
January 5, 2017Jan 5, 201701/5/17In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance.
I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap,
Hololens
April 29, 2015Apr 29, 201504/29/15It may take some time to process all of the game changing announcements that came out of the BUILD keynote today. If you missed it, be sure and check out the on-demand recording here.
Satya framed up the road forward to build an intelligent cloud,
January 21, 2015Jan 21, 201501/21/15The live Windows 10 Briefing today was full of new information about innovative and groundbreaking technology aligned with the Windows 10 release. Many of these announcements covered the seamless user experience across devices to make computing “more human”. Spotlights included Windows 10 speech support and personal assistance via Cortona,
IoT
January 15, 2020Jan 15, 202001/15/20Social bots on the way. Now that we’ve voice commanded everything in our house, the natural next step is to give it a face, a response, a smile. When I demo’d Misty to our FIRST Robotics team, they immediately fell in love – it’s so cute, you just wanna pitch the cheeks.
June 14, 2019Jun 14, 201906/14/19JetPack 4.2 includes an Ubuntu 18.04 environment and updates to CUDA, Tensorflow, and Open CV. One of the best changes is support for Python 3 in the version of Open CV provided. In JetPack 3.3 a build of Open CV was necessary to support Python 3, and this was not a trivial undertaking.
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19The inherent nature of the cloud is that there can be momentary loss of network connectivity, temporary loss of service, and timeouts that can occur for a variety of reasons. By designing your application to handle these types of events gracefully, you can improve availability and minimize impact from transient events.
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19In this post, App Dev Manager, Robert Schumann shows how to get started with Windows 10 IoT Core with Raspberry Bi 3 B+.
Jumping right in, let’s get a few matters out of the way upfront.
This article specifically uses the Raspberry Pi 3 model B+
If you’re not sure what model of Pi you’re running then review how-to details here: https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/09/checking-your-raspberry-pi-board-version/
Topics covered should take about 30 minutes to complete provided everything you need is readily available.
December 21, 2018Dec 21, 201812/21/18This is going to be an IoT solution, which receives data from connected devices, stores the data and makes it available for consumption by a holographic or mobile application. So, you will first learn to set up the backend infrastructure--where you will have a device--which connects with a Cloud Gateway. Data received by the Cloud Gateway is stored within persistent storage, and finally, this data will be made available to a Holographic or Mobile app through Web APIs.
November 7, 2018Nov 7, 201811/7/18Have you ever tried building an IoT solution on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi with an ARM processor? What languages did you have to use? What if that device had to send data to the cloud for dashboarding and alerting? How would you build the dashboard and manage alerts for authorized users?
June 4, 2018Jun 4, 201806/4/18In the fourth post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about how to configure within the Azure IoT Hub.
In the first part of this series,
June 1, 2018Jun 1, 201806/1/18In the third post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about writing the code for the sensor rig to send telemetry data to Azure IoT Hub.
May 29, 2018May 29, 201805/29/18In the second post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about developing the IoT sensor rig.
In the first part of this series,
May 17, 2018May 17, 201805/17/18Premier Developer Consultant, Steve St Jean, shares a personal story on how he used Azure IoT to figure out a solution to a problem that many of us face – high electric bills. In the series, Steve shares the process and code that he used to implement this solution.
Kubernetes
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
January 3, 2020Jan 3, 202001/3/20AKS to bring rapid development, deployment, scale and monitoring for your applications with confidence. Prometheus is a leading open source monitoring solution. Learn how to integrate Prometheus with AKS for your application monitoring needs.
September 25, 2019Sep 25, 201909/25/19Using Azure services like AKS, Azure Container Instances and Azure Dev Spaces makes setting up a cluster and testing your containers relatively simple.
September 18, 2019Sep 18, 201909/18/19Dans cet article, Nous vous proposons des astuces pour réussir votre certification de développeur Kubernetes (CKAD – Certified Kubernetes Application Developer).
August 13, 2019Aug 13, 201908/13/19In this post, we'll offer guidance on preparing for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam.
April 22, 2019Apr 22, 201904/22/19Azure Kubernetes Service brings a world class managed kubernetes service to the cloud. Customers can now leverage the power of Kubernetes platform without having to worry about managing the control plane. As a result of that, customers are now able to embark on the containerization journey with confidence. In this blog post, we will see how Visual Studio makes it easy to collaborate with AKS using Azure Dev Spaces.
April 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19One of the best practices with containers is not to persist data inside the containers for long term as containers are ephermal. These containers can be removed and rebuilt very often and may require storage that persists across pods beyond the application lifecycle. In this blog post, we will learn about how to create Persistent Volumes in AKS with Azure Files.
March 28, 2019Mar 28, 201903/28/19It’s no secret that you can run a local version of Kubernetes on Docker Desktop for Windows, however, getting the Dashboard installed and configured correctly can be challenging. The problem is that the default installation requires you to manage an admin user and copy that user's bearer token into the portal to login.
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19In this follow up article, we will cover how it can help to deploy Container images stored into Azure Container Registry (ACR). We will also cover the kubectl explain integration which is helpful to understand the structure of YAML files used to describe Kubernetes API objects.
December 26, 2018Dec 26, 201812/26/18VS Code can really be the platform of choice to benefit from the best features. Furthermore, its cross platform support allow users to have the same customer experience on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).
Microservices
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.
March 4, 2020Mar 4, 202003/4/20Dapr is an event driven runtime that helps to build stateless and stateful microservice applications, with a diversity of languages and frameworks.
Migration
September 25, 2015Sep 25, 201509/25/15In Part 1 of this 5 part series, Senior Application Development Manager, Chuck Goodspeed, shares insights and lessons from a large Windows Server 2003 migration.
July of 2015, Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 came to an end.
By this point of time,
ML
October 4, 2019Oct 4, 201910/4/19Where would you find all three (AI, ML and DS) at work? The most common place today is in autonomous driving vehicles. All three disciplines work together to help train an algorithm to recognize obstacles (MS), then to provide real-time actions (AI) to the vehicle, all based on large amounts of information that data science (DS) can analyze.
August 23, 2019Aug 23, 201908/23/19ML.NET enables developers to implement machine learning tasks like classification, regression, clustering, and recommendation ... etc. In this post, I will show you how to get started with ML.NET implementing permutation feature importance for employee attrition.
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
Mobile
December 7, 2018Dec 7, 201812/7/18I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.
August 23, 2016Aug 23, 201608/23/16In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard shows how to navigate past some of the issues when setting up VSTS builds for a multi-project Xamarin.Forms solution.
The other day I wanted to create a DevOps CI / CD pipeline for a simple Xamarin.Forms app that I’d created.
July 23, 2016Jul 23, 201607/23/16In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Joe Healy shows us how to create global resources in Xamarin Forms.
Xaml developers moving to Xamarin Forms are hoping to take some of their good habits from the Windows (WPF/Silverlight/UWP) dev world with them (probably a few of their bad ones as well but we don’t want to talk about those).
April 22, 2016Apr 22, 201604/22/16In this blog post, Application Development Managers, Derrick Sharpe and Justin Wendlandt, highlight the many options to maximize development productivity across a range of mobile platforms, including Windows 10, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and more.
Contrary to popular belief, the Windows Phone application development landscape is not dead.
July 20, 2015Jul 20, 201507/20/15Today, we are happy to announce availability of Visual Studio 2013/TFS 2013 Update 5 and the release of Visual Studio 2015 RTM. This Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Visual Studio 2015 includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development,
.NET
March 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.
March 28, 2020Mar 28, 202003/28/20ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, open-source framework for building modern , cloud-based, connected applications. With ASP.NET core you can build web apps, API APS, Microservices, mobile backends, and IoT apps.
March 28, 2020Mar 28, 202003/28/20ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, open-source framework for building modern , cloud-based, connected applications. With ASP.NET core you can build web apps, API APS, Microservices, Mobile backends, and IoT apps.
March 20, 2020Mar 20, 202003/20/20There are situations where people would like to have a comprehensive view of the feature comparison. Instead of digging into every feature across all three platform, I compiled a list of name spaces in each platform and put them side by side so you can easily see the differences.
March 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.
February 7, 2020Feb 7, 202002/7/20QnA Maker is an Azure Cognitive Service that enables you to ask questions and get answers from a knowledgebase built from your own documentation. In this post, learn how to integrate a QnA Maker knowledgebase into a client application.
January 29, 2020Jan 29, 202001/29/20I thought it would be helpful to show you how you can access your Azure resource consumption data via .NET. Having access to this data at the code level can allow ways to do other things if a budget limit is reached for a particular resource.
January 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.
January 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.
January 9, 2020Jan 9, 202001/9/20In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to containerize a client-side Blazor application for Azure deployment.
.NET Internals
October 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18 ... when used with async/await.
TaskCompletionSource
July 17, 2018Jul 17, 201807/17/18If you’re familiar with C#, then you most likely heard that you should always override Equals and GetHashCode for custom structs for performance reasons. To better understand the importance and the rationale behind this advice we’re going to look at the default behavior to see why and where the performance hit comes from.
January 25, 2018Jan 25, 201801/25/18The async series
Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.
In the last two blog posts we’ve covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods.
January 11, 2018Jan 11, 201801/11/18The async series
Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.
In the previous blog post we discussed how the C# compiler transforms asynchronous methods.
September 21, 2017Sep 21, 201709/21/17In the recent blog posts we’ve discussed invisible part of the object layout in the CLR:
Managed object internals, Part 1. The Layout
Managed object internals, Part 2. Object header layout and the cost of locking
Managed object internals, Part 3.
September 12, 2017Sep 12, 201709/12/17Arrays are one of the basic building blocks of every applications. Even if you do not use arrays directly every day you definitely use them indirectly as part of almost any library.
C# has arrays from the very beginning and back in the day that was the only “generic”-like and type safe data structure available.
September 6, 2017Sep 6, 201709/6/17Working on my current project I’ve faced a very interesting situation. For each object of a given type, I had to create a monotonically growing identifier with few caveats: 1) the solution should work in multithreaded environment 2) the number of objects is fairly large,
May 26, 2017May 26, 201705/26/17The 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,
May 17, 2017May 17, 201705/17/17Discussions on reddit, hacker news.
Recently I’ve noticed that the Equal method from our ValueTuple (*) struct generates significant memory traffic (~1Gb). That was a bit of a surprise to me. This struct is well designed and was used pretty heavily in many performance critical scenarios.
May 9, 2017May 9, 201705/9/17Here is a seemingly simple question for you: Is it possible that the CLR will call a finalizer for an instance when an instance method is still running? In other words, is it possible in the following case to see ‘Finalizing instance.’ before ‘Finished doing something.’?
Office 365
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20In this post, I will go through the broad strokes of setting up Office 365 Education. The starting point is the Office 365 A1 trial sign up page.
Performance
January 4, 2020Jan 4, 202001/4/20Learn how Azure PaaS powers NORAD’s Santa Tracker allowing for 51 million Page Views with an average response time of 100MS across the globe.
December 31, 2019Dec 31, 201912/31/19Collect Service Fabric traces and diagnostic data with CollectServiceFabricData - a tool used by the Azure Service Fabric Support team to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Learn how to configure your cluster today and start using CollectServiceFabricData.
November 5, 2019Nov 5, 201911/5/19Using Log Analytics to efficiently monitor Azure virtual machine disk throttling.
May 16, 2019May 16, 201905/16/19Application Insights is an Azure-hosted service which provides for in-depth application monitoring, whether running in the cloud or on-premise. It provides powerful tools for monitoring, analysis, and diagnosis, with capabilities such as live metrics streaming, tracking response times and failure rates, and much more.
April 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19When we target performance issues with SharePoint, the focus is generally on database related queries and all the requests that are being made to critical assets for the site like images, JavaScript files, CSS etc. A quick response time for these resources are vital for your page to function optimally.
March 6, 2019Mar 6, 201903/6/19Performance (aka. Perfmon) Counters are critical to understanding the health of and diagnosing issues on Windows. In recent performance and scalability testing of a solution built on top of Azure Service Fabric, we collected Perfmon Counters across 15 VMs and sent them to Log Analytics. This was very helpful; however, there were times when we wanted them to be real time.
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19Do I need to add more servers if my user load grows by 10% each month for the next 12 months? That is a hard question to answer. Unless you have an Application Platform Management solution, it is hard to correlate function calls to CPU time and response times.
May 3, 2018May 3, 201805/3/18As you may know from my previous posts “The ‘in’-modifier and the readonly structs in C#” and “Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#”, structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in “readonly”
April 11, 2018Apr 11, 201804/11/18The C# language from the very first version supported passing arguments by value or by reference. But before C# 7 the C# compiler supported only one way of returning a value from a method (or a property) – returning by value.
January 25, 2018Jan 25, 201801/25/18The async series
Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.
In the last two blog posts we’ve covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods.
Premier Developer
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
April 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.
March 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.
March 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.
March 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.
March 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.
March 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.
Powershell
November 8, 2019Nov 8, 201911/8/19In this post, App Dev Manager Edward Fry demonstrates how to use Microsoft Outlook Object Library from PowerShell.
Introduction
Time is a precious commodity. For many professionals, there just aren’t enough hours to accomplish all the tasks in a day. Thankfully,
August 27, 2019Aug 27, 201908/27/19With the recent GA announcement of Azure Ultra Disk Storage, customers now have access to Managed Disks for extremely high performance and mission critical workloads. With increased IOPS and throughput, it's important for architects to understand Azure's throttling limits to ensure they design systems optimally.
May 18, 2017May 18, 201705/18/17In this post, Application Development Managers, Daniel Setlock and John Spinella demonstrate how to export the Managed Metadata Term Store via PowerShell to a SiteMap, and import that SiteMap into a multi-tiered dropdown into the Structured Navigation within SharePoint through a code-less method.
August 30, 2015Aug 30, 201508/30/15The Developer Ramp-Up Series, offered through Premier Support for Developers, is a collection of webcasts created with the goal of teaching developers basic development skills. No prior knowledge is necessary. The current offering includes a collection of webcasts and hands on lab guides/exercises in the areas of PowerShell,
Premier
March 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.
March 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.
March 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.
March 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.
March 11, 2020Mar 11, 202003/11/20In this multi-part series, App Dev Manager Jon Guerin and Premier Consultant Daniel Taylor (@dbabulldog) lays out some best practices around setting up and using In-Memory OLTP.
March 9, 2020Mar 9, 202003/9/20When creating workflows with Azure Logic Apps, developers are often amazed at the amount of functionality at their fingertips. With a few simple clicks, you can create extremely capable automation, with integrations into multiple systems.
January 23, 2020Jan 23, 202001/23/20Premier Consultant Andrew Charbonneau explains how he conducts flawless demos with help of Git.
January 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.
January 15, 2020Jan 15, 202001/15/20Azure API for FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) enables rapid exchange of data through FHIR APIs, backed by a managed Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) offering in the cloud. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist Protected Health Information PHI in the cloud.
January 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20In this post, Premier Consultant Pete Tian demonstrate how to use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Projects.
Quantum Computing
May 26, 2019May 26, 201905/26/19Microsoft is developing Q#, "the domain-specific programming languages used for expressing quantum algorithms." Ingest as much as you can. There are also a host of resources online from videos to White Papers, including resources on the Microsoft Quantum Computing site.
April 18, 2019Apr 18, 201904/18/19The underpinnings of quantum computing (QC) is quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics is very weird and hard to understand. Most articles on QC are of the pop science variety and introductions to QC are usually heavy on mathematics (linear algebra). I want to do something different. I want to explain QC using the language of software development.
Security
January 30, 2020Jan 30, 202001/30/20I created this post in response to questions from one of my customers which may be useful to others regarding Microsoft’s support plans around TLS 1.3 and upcoming releases.
December 2, 2019Dec 2, 201912/2/19We believe that Secure DevOps encompasses both a set of practices and a mindset shift to help customer adopt security principles and practices aligned with the culture shift and integrated with the practices, of DevOps. Secure DevOps practices include and build on those practices that are part of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle.
September 20, 2019Sep 20, 201909/20/19Building applications operating in the internet environment requires understanding of options available for performing authentication and authorization. These options include, both a variety of protocols such as OAuth2 and WS-Federation, as well as tools and toolkits such as Azure AD, AD FS and ADAL.
August 6, 2019Aug 6, 201908/6/19Beyond Lean, another important contributor to DevOps is the safety science movement. In this blog, Ron discusses this subject and show how important this is and how it changes the ways we think of the systems we build.
June 17, 2019Jun 17, 201906/17/19Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon explores OAuth2 questions you need to ask and how the answers lead to the selection of the grant.
The OAuth2 specifications define six different grant types (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-device-flow-15). Each provides the most optimal (from the security point of view) way of obtaining access or (for OIDC) id_tokens given the circumstances of the client application.
June 16, 2019Jun 16, 201906/16/19It is extremely difficult to find individuals with Security+ accreditation. Achieving this accreditation not only helps you but also helps defense contracting companies and the DoD community to fill in those national security related positions with those specialized needs.
May 28, 2019May 28, 201905/28/19When it comes to data, there is never a thing as too much security. With identify theft and breaches becoming a daily occurrence, ensuring sensitive information is protected is essential to business. Microsoft Azure has been designed from the ground-up to be one of the most secure places to store your information. Let me prove it!
May 24, 2019May 24, 201905/24/19Accessing Groups claims in Azure AD B2C requires adding some custom code through custom (IEF) policies. This post shows how to configure AD B2C IEF policies to access Groups in JWT Tokens.
May 22, 2019May 22, 201905/22/19Learn how DoD leverages Azure DevOps to promote code from higher information level (IL) environment from a lower IL environment using Microsoft-Hosted and Self-Hosted Agents.
May 12, 2019May 12, 201905/12/19Secure your applications with Microsoft Identity Platform couldn't be any easier. In this blog, we’ll walk through very quick steps to help you start experimenting with authentication capabilities using Azure AD identities.
SharePoint
April 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20We decided on another great Azure Resource, the Azure Durable Function, because we wanted to provide SharePoint a custom status that could be leveraged for a progress bar, we also had the need to build a separate function that had a workflow that could span hours or even days.
March 17, 2020Mar 17, 202003/17/20This post will give an example of creating a callout in SharePoint. The gd-sprest library was recently updated to include the SharePoint Callout Manager helper class, which we will be using for this example.
February 17, 2020Feb 17, 202002/17/20This post will give an example of getting WebPart information for a page, using the REST API. The gd-sprest library will be used for this example.
February 13, 2020Feb 13, 202002/13/20Premier Field Engineer Gunjan Datta demonstrates how to retrieve data from SharePoint using NodeJS.
January 29, 2020Jan 29, 202001/29/20This post will give an example of starting a SharePoint workflow using the REST API. The gd-sprest library was recently updated to include the SharePoint Workflow REST API endpoints, which we will be using for this example.
Telemetry
April 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20Telemetry Processor is a plug-ins that can be ingested in your application to customize how telemetry can be processed before it’s sent to the Application Insights service such as filtering out telemetry, replace or discard a telemetry item, etc.
March 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.
January 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20In this post, Premier Consultant Pete Tian demonstrate how to use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Projects.
January 3, 2020Jan 3, 202001/3/20AKS to bring rapid development, deployment, scale and monitoring for your applications with confidence. Prometheus is a leading open source monitoring solution. Learn how to integrate Prometheus with AKS for your application monitoring needs.
December 31, 2019Dec 31, 201912/31/19Collect Service Fabric traces and diagnostic data with CollectServiceFabricData - a tool used by the Azure Service Fabric Support team to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Learn how to configure your cluster today and start using CollectServiceFabricData.
December 30, 2019Dec 30, 201912/30/19 Monitoring our systems is key to a healthy, predictable, and stable environment. Learn how Azure Monitor helps simplify monitoring of Azure solutions including data platforms such as Azure SQL.
October 9, 2019Oct 9, 201910/9/19In this post, learn how to use Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to determine metrics not available under standard Metrics blade in Azure Portal. In this post, I will show you how to leverage Azure Storage $logs for enhanced reporting.
May 16, 2019May 16, 201905/16/19Application Insights is an Azure-hosted service which provides for in-depth application monitoring, whether running in the cloud or on-premise. It provides powerful tools for monitoring, analysis, and diagnosis, with capabilities such as live metrics streaming, tracking response times and failure rates, and much more.
January 18, 2019Jan 18, 201901/18/19One feature was removed in Application Insights called Scheduled Analytics, and now it is replaced with Custom Log Search which allows us to create an Alerts based on data analytics queries.
October 10, 2018Oct 10, 201810/10/18 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.
Threading
February 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code, kudos to you.
TPL
November 30, 2017Nov 30, 201711/30/17The async series
Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.
The C# language is great for developer’s productivity and I’m glad for the recent push towards making it more suitable for high-performance applications.
December 20, 2016Dec 20, 201612/20/16I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and the thread pool will do its best to maximize application throughput by using optimal number of threads that will process the input data.
Training
April 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.
October 15, 2019Oct 15, 201910/15/19Investing in your people not only helps build essential, competitive skills but it can also reduce employee churn that will disrupt projects. Show me any highly effective dev team and I’ll show you passionate learners that share knowledge and try new things. These things go hand in hand.
May 23, 2019May 23, 201905/23/19Learn how to organize and run your own successful Hour of Code learning events.
March 22, 2019Mar 22, 201903/22/19Anyone who has ever passed at least one of the Microsoft certification exams has a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) profile created with an ID (MCID) generated. This profile is now part of the Microsoft Learning platform that allows a person to track all activities related to certification accomplishments, both active and past.
February 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19As a Microsoft employee who works with customers and a cloud enthusiast, I see it essential to be knowledgeable of how the cloud can bring the best value to the developer. Because of this, I am taking the AZ 203 exam, which is titled “Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure”. This exam was in beta for some time and was recently released proper in January 2019. Developers used to the Microsoft certification world will see this exam as a replacement for 70-532, which is the older iteration of Azure technology geared for developers. Passing this exam will reward developers with the “Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate” certification. Going forward, most Microsoft certifications are moving to a job-role based (great take by Chris Pietschmann at Build Azure) approach, which in my opinion is a good move, as it allows folks to focus on passing exams that contain content that will directly be used on the job.
June 15, 2018Jun 15, 201806/15/18Are you interested in learning about DevOps and the newest advances in technology? Do you want to challenge your development perspectives and current practices? Read this post from Premier Developer Consultant Brian Blackman to find an upcoming conference for you and your team to attend.
March 21, 2018Mar 21, 201803/21/18Interested in upping your online presentation game? Looking for some tips to engage your audience on Skype calls? Read this post by Premier Developer Consultant Daisy Chaussee to learn how.
Today’s modern, virtual world relies on the ability to deliver content remotely.
July 14, 2017Jul 14, 201707/14/17This post is provided by Senior ADM, Jason Giordano, who spotlights our DebugDiag workshop available to Premier Support customers.
If you have ever engaged Microsoft to assist with an application hang or crash, chances are, DebugDiag was used at some point.
November 14, 2016Nov 14, 201611/14/16Teams struggle to keep up with the latest technology trends, so training and knowledge transfer are important investments to build the expertise required for optimal application and infrastructure. It’s a great way to proactively stay in front of technical gaps that can manifest in the form of implementation delays,
October 14, 2016Oct 14, 201610/14/16Teams struggle to keep up with the latest technology trends, so training and knowledge transfer are important investments to build the expertise required for optimal application and infrastructure. It’s a great way to proactively stay in front of technical gaps that can manifest in the form of implementation delays,
UX
January 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20 Traditional data binding is expensive. It uses reflection and there are heavy demands on the CPU and on memory. In this post, Premier Consultant Bill Reiss explains how compiled bindings can improve performance in UWP apps.
December 23, 2019Dec 23, 201912/23/19With a mission to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more”— it’s increasingly important for Microsoft employees to have a conversation about User Centered Design4 (UCD). As developers, we are building products for people to use, so we need to ensure we are putting them at the center of it.
August 2, 2019Aug 2, 201908/2/19Accessibility improves usability; considering accessibility reviews early-on and at all stages gives us an opportunity to not only save cycles of design, dev, and QA, but more importantly, it creates a more usable product for everyone.
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19This example illustrates why building a better UI and caring about how your end users is so valuable. Not only can it improve their experience, but it can also save your business time and money.
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19One thing that I’ve heard more than a few times while working in UX is that you can’t put a price on look and feel. Personally, I want to clear the air right now and say you absolutely can. It’s not hard, but it does require narrowing your focus to a particular workflow.
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19When I first joined the Premier team here at Microsoft, a lot of the work I initially did for our customers was just that – advisory front-end design work. After many discussions about how I can provide value to our customers, I started to realize that even though words likes User Experience and User Centered Design are starting to be thrown out more and more in development, very few people have a full grasp of what exactly User Experience is.
Visual Studio
September 23, 2019Sep 23, 201909/23/19.NET Conf 2019, a free, 3-day, virtual developer event
June 11, 2019Jun 11, 201906/11/19In this blog post, I’ll discuss something that has frustrated both myself and many others for quite a while, and that is, failure of Visual Studio to connect to an Azure Service Fabric cluster. We’ll be using Visual Studio 2017 as an example.
June 7, 2019Jun 7, 201906/7/19I need to develop cross platform solutions and am often working in Linux, so I have taken to using Visual Studio Code as my IDE instead of Visual Studio.
June 7, 2019Jun 7, 201906/7/19Visual Studio Code offers feature parity with Visual Studio 2017/2019 when it comes to developing a containerized Asp.Net Core application. Since VSCode is cross platform, you can develop your next container DotNetCore application on a Linux or Mac while having access to all the great features that Windows users enjoy on VS2017/2019.
January 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19My first experience matched many of experiences I remember mentioned in the books I read. At first, paired programming was extremely intimidating. I had to pair with an extremely seasoned developer thinking that I was about to be proved that I was not as smart as I thought I was – see Imposter Syndrome. Well, I learned many lessons from this developer by pairing with him. And in the end the developer learned quite a bit from me.
October 2, 2018Oct 2, 201810/2/18It's all about the people. The resistance to change is human nature. Leaders and team members alike. Assessing the team is simple. If they can demonstrate an openness to changing how they do things you are on track. If team conversations consist of why things must continue to be done the way they are being done success will be a challenge. But leadership is the real key. Effective change is a collaborative process and management's primary team facing role is keeping the team within the agreed upon boundaries. But of equal importance is securing and managing executive sponsorship. The team is pushing hard against their own instincts for the betterment of the organization. The organization must support them and insulate them from organizational winds that look to disrupt their efforts.
May 23, 2018May 23, 201805/23/18In this post, App Dev Manager Ed Tovsen spotlight the features and benefits of Code Maps in Visual Studio.
Systems architects have long used modeling to design the structure, behavior, and interaction of systems within an organization. Modeling helps to ensure that requirements are clearly defined between users and IT.
April 26, 2018Apr 26, 201804/26/18ASP Core uses the convenient Provider Pattern to load configuration key/value pairs from various sources and expose those to you as a single Configuration object. This allows you to grab a configuration key like ConnectionString with one line of code regardless of where it was sourced from. However, the configuration API is not available by default in .NET Core Console applications.
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18In the second part of her SonarQube series, Premier Developer Consultant Sana Noorani builds on top of SonarQube technology and explains how SonarLint can be added in Visual Studio to track real time code quality.
What is SonarLint?
SonarLint an extension you can add to an IDE such as Visual Studio that can provide developers real-time feedback on the quality of the code.
March 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard discusses how to set up Visual Studio 2017 to run JavaScript-based unit tests.
This week, I demonstrated to a client how they could write unit tests in JavaScript to test their JavaScript code by leveraging Karma,
Web
March 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.
January 30, 2020Jan 30, 202001/30/20I created this post in response to questions from one of my customers which may be useful to others regarding Microsoft’s support plans around TLS 1.3 and upcoming releases.
January 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.
January 17, 2020Jan 17, 202001/17/20In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to run Blazor Components in existing ASP.NET Core MVC apps.
January 9, 2020Jan 9, 202001/9/20In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to containerize a client-side Blazor application for Azure deployment.
January 4, 2020Jan 4, 202001/4/20Learn how Azure PaaS powers NORAD’s Santa Tracker allowing for 51 million Page Views with an average response time of 100MS across the globe.
November 22, 2019Nov 22, 201911/22/19Sr Consultant Adam Toth demonstrates how to handle errors properly in Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), including expected errors from APIs and connectors, and how to deal with throttling conditions (HTTP 429 Responses).
Power Automate’s default response to errors from connectors is pretty simple – exit the workflow right there and record the entire run as a failure.
August 8, 2019Aug 8, 201908/8/19As a follow-up to my original post explaining how to Deploy Ghost CMS on Azure Web App, learn how to configure Azure Web App Platform and Node.js to run as 64-bit, a prerequisite for the latest Ghost build.
August 2, 2019Aug 2, 201908/2/19Accessibility improves usability; considering accessibility reviews early-on and at all stages gives us an opportunity to not only save cycles of design, dev, and QA, but more importantly, it creates a more usable product for everyone.
June 19, 2019Jun 19, 201906/19/19In this walkthrough, our App Dev Managers show how to install, configure and containerize a simple webapp to help you get up and running with Docker.
Xamarin
January 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20 Traditional data binding is expensive. It uses reflection and there are heavy demands on the CPU and on memory. In this post, Premier Consultant Bill Reiss explains how compiled bindings can improve performance in UWP apps.
May 15, 2017May 15, 201705/15/17This post is from Premier Developer consultant Joe Healy who recently became a Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer. Congrats Joe!
Microsoft likes us to have some technical certifications. Personally I enjoy the challenges of the tests. This year my goals were the Windows 10 UWP Developer exam ( Developing Mobile Apps 70-357 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-357.aspx )and the Xamarin Certified Developer accreditation ( https://university.xamarin.com/certification ).
July 20, 2015Jul 20, 201507/20/15Today, we are happy to announce availability of Visual Studio 2013/TFS 2013 Update 5 and the release of Visual Studio 2015 RTM. This Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Visual Studio 2015 includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development,
