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Comment l’IA générative impacte-t-elle l’expérience développeur?
Adlene Sifi explore l'impact de l'IA générative sur l'expérience des développeurs. Dans cet article, nous allons tenter de déterminer s’il existe un lien entre l’utilisation de l’IA générative (ex. : GitHub Copilot) et l’expérience développeur (DevEx). Nous souhaitons vérifier plus précisément si l’utilisation de l’IA générative a un impact positif sur l’expérience développeur. Nous tenterons même de vérifier s’il existe un lien de causalité entre l’utilisation de l’IA générative et l’amélioration de l’expérience développeur. Nous allons dans un premier temps commencer par définir ces deux concepts. ...
How does generative AI impact Developer Experience?
Adlene Sifi explores the impact of generative AI on developer experience. In this article, we will try to determine if there is a link between the use of generative AI (e.g., GitHub Copilot) and developer experience (DevEx). Specifically, we aim to verify whether the use of generative AI has a positive impact on developer experience. We will even try to see if there is a causal link between the use of generative AI and the improvement of developer experience. First, let's define these two concepts. What is developer experience? Is it a new buzzword? A market trend? Worse, is it a new marketing tactic...
Supercharge Developer Workflows with GitHub Copilot Workspace Extensions
David Minkovski takes you on a hands-on journey to extend GitHub Copilot beyond just being a code assistant — turning it into a true AI-powered teammate inside VS Code. Motivation It is 2025 and Software Developers are faced with an incredibly fast-paced high-tech landscape — full of innovation and automation around every corner. Even with the consideration of AI taking on many roles (and hopefully not our jobs just yet) we are constantly challenged with rising complexities of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures and cognitive loads as well as context switching and endless interruptions. I c...
AI-Powered Customer Support: The Ultimate Multi-Agent System
David Minkovski explores using Azure OpenAI and Rust to Build Intelligent and Scalable AI Systems Motivation For the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of taking the front seat to some really fascinating and exciting AI projects, thanks to my amazing customers and colleagues at Microsoft. During these sessions, I noticed a common challenge: How do I use ChatGPT while keeping control? So, I thought to myself, why not write a little article to help? Let’s break it down and create a super simple “multi-agent” system. This system will handle everything from the initial customer support request to e...
Deploying WebJobs to Azure Container Apps
Debjyoti Ganguly walks through the process of migrating existing WebJobs to Azure Container App Jobs, highlighting the benefits and providing practical steps to implement this migration effectively Introduction As businesses scale, the need for a robust and scalable environment for running background jobs becomes essential. Azure Container App Jobs offer a modern, scalable, and containerized solution for running background jobs, providing significant benefits over traditional Azure WebJobs. This guide will walk you through the process of migrating existing WebJobs to Azure Container App Jobs, highlighting...
AI: The New Frontier for Developers
AJ Enns reflects on his journey as a new developer and the impact of AI as an integrated, coding assistant for improving developer velocity. The year is 2024, and AI has been around for a while. ChatGPT broke onto the scene and changed the world forever. As soon as I heard about it, the first thing I did was try to learn Blazor with the help of AI. Within 3 weeks, I had a working example in a language I did not know before, as a result I was hooked. How do I share my recent learnings and amazement? Working as a Developer Advocate, I quickly learned that both the Developer and the Business were not early ad...
Debugging a managed identity connection to Azure SQL in Azure App Service using containers
Dominique St-Amand explores how to debug a managed identity connection from a container-based App Service to Azure SQL. So you’ve been eager to deploy your containerized web application that you’ve been working on for a while, to Azure App Service. You follow the best security practices which means you’ve setup your connection to your Azure SQL database using a managed identity. Upon loading your application, you get a dreadful exception that you can’t connect to the database. You then wonder, is this a database permission problem or some another problem, such as the application cannot connect to the datab...
Autogen RAG
Linkai Yu explores the retrieval-augemented generation pattern with Azure OpenAI Assistants API. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern is the standard for integrating ground AI with local data. One powerful way to implement RAG is through the function call or tool call feature in the Function Call API. When examining the samples provided by the Azure OpenAI Assistant API Function Call, Completion API Function Call, or Autogen Function Call, they all require the function metadata to be specified in the code. Imagine you have hundreds of data I/O functions, ranging from SQL queries to microservice...
Boosting Azure DevOps Security with GHAS Code Scanning
Debjyoti Ganguly shares insights on the security benefits and configuration of GHAS Code Scanning with Azure DevOps. Boosting Azure DevOps Security with GHAS Code Scanning Code scanning, a pipeline-based tool available in GitHub Advanced Security, is designed to detect code vulnerabilities and bugs within the source code of ADO (Azure DevOps) repositories. Utilizing CodeQL as a static analysis tool, it performs query analysis and variant analysis. When vulnerabilities are found, it generates security alerts. CodeQL CodeQL is a powerful static analysis tool used for showing vulnerabilities and bugs in so...
Running Open AI Whisper on Azure
Monu Bambroo explores Whisper, a speech to text model from OpenAI that you can use to transcribe audio files. The model is trained on a large dataset of English audio and text. The model is optimized for transcribing audio files that contain speech in English. The model can also be used to transcribe audio files that contain speech in other languages. Whisper is an advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, developed using 680,000 hours of supervised multilingual and multitask data from the web. This extensive and diverse data set enhances its ability to handle various accents, background noise, a...
Copilot Studio – Prompt Response Times
Tahir Naveed walks through how to measure prompt response times with Microsoft Copilot Studio and explores considerations that factor into the overall performance of these requests. Building custom copilots (GenAI chatbots) in Microsoft Copilot Studio is amazing. Especially with the new functionalities which were released in Microsoft Build 2024. What’s more amazing is when we can point the custom copilots to different kinds of external and internal data sources like public websites (external), Dataverse tables (internal), SharePoint etc. Today we will be looking at how to check the response time of a p...
VBScript deprecation: Timelines and next steps
Scripting options for web development and task automation are modernizing. To provide you with the most modern and efficient options, we are replacing VBScript with more advanced alternatives such as JavaScript and PowerShell. Find out what VBScript deprecation means for you and how you can get ready. What is VBScript? Visual Basic Scripting Edition, commonly referred to as VBScript, is a lightweight scripting language first introduced by Microsoft in 1996. The language has been available as a system component in Windows OS and has been widely used for automating tasks and controlling applications on Windows-ba...
Azure CI/CD: Govern seamlessly from start to finish
Debjyoti Ganguly shares insights on a resilient end-to-end cloud governance framework for Azure CI/CD pipelines. Hey there, tech enthusiasts! This article serves as a technical guide to implementing a resilient end-to-end cloud governance framework for Azure CI/CD pipelines. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic and aligns seamlessly with enterprise security objectives, considerations, and compliance requirements. Throughout this discourse, we will employ the Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model, a familiar concept utilized within the Azure Resource Manager framework. Decisive Process Deconstructi...
Azure Machine Learning Service for Kubernetes Architects: Deploy Your First Model on AKS with AZ CLI v2
Joseph Masengesho provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to deploy your first ML model on AKS. In a previous post, I provided a lengthy write-up about my understanding of using Kubernetes as a compute target in Azure ML from a Kubernetes architect’s perspective. In this post, I will offer a step-by-step tutorial that teaches you how to deploy your first ML model on AKS. As a disclaimer, I am not a data scientist; however, I work with customers who deploy ML workloads on Kubernetes. In this tutorial, we will deploy a trained regression model based on the MNIST Dataset, which consists of 60K handwritten digi...
How to visualize Semantic Kernel & Azure OpenAI plans using Mermaid
Jordan Bean explores how to visualize Semantic Kernel & Azure OpenAI plans using Mermaid. Using the function calling ability of Semantic Kernel/OpenAI is very exciting from an application development point of view. Instead of hard-coding paths though the system, Semantic Kernel & OpenAI can decide for themselves what plugins to call, the order of operations, parsing input & output, etc. However, it can be challenging to understand why the system decided to go down a path & all of the operations, prompts, function calls, etc. that occurred. Semantic Kernel provides a class that record...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Discovering the Ideal Service Connection Strategy
John Folberth explores various configurations, decisions, and pros/cons that should be evaluated when deciding how your DevOps environment will deploy code into Azure. About This post is part of an overall series on Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines. The series will cover any and all topics that fall into the scope of Azure DevOps Pipelines. I encourage you to check it out if you are new to this space. Introduction When an organization is trying to configure their Azure DevOps (ADO) environment to deploy into Azure, they are immediately met with the dilemma on how their DevOps instance will execute the deploy...
Hands-On Azure Container Apps 101 — Deploying a scalable Go-Backend
David Minkovski shares a hands-on guide to explore the power and simplicity of Azure Container Apps and Azure Front Door as a great alternative to Azure Kubernetes Services and other Kubernetes implementations for developers. Motivation I am sure you have seen the world go crazy about Kubernetes and while this technology is amazing and has many benefits, the complexities of managing these clusters can be quite, how shall I put this…challenging. Well lucky for us Microsoft has come up with some real magic — Embrace the simplicity and power of Azure Container Apps and enjoy hassle-free web app deployment....
How to enhance your chatbot so it can retrieve data from multiple data sources & orchestrate its own plan with C# Semantic Kernel, planner & Azure OpenAI – part 4 (local development & deployment details)
In this multi-part series, Jordan Bean shares how to enhance a chatbot to retrieve data from multiple data sources and orchestrate plans with C# Semantic Kernel, planner, and Azure Open AI. In the previous post, I detailed how the demo app runs. In this post, let’s talk about some of the techniques & technologies I used to make the demo easy to deploy & run. Here is the link to the GitHub repo. Project Tye Project Tye is an open-source project that makes it easy to stand up a microservice-based application locally. It is easy to run any individual API or web app, such as running or . Ho...
How to enhance your chatbot so it can retrieve data from multiple data sources & orchestrate its own plan with C# Semantic Kernel, planner & Azure OpenAI – part 3 (demo app)
In this multi-part series, Jordan Bean shares how to enhance a chatbot to retrieve data from multiple data sources and orchestrate plans with C# Semantic Kernel, planner, and Azure Open AI. In the previous post, we talked about the implementation details of how the demo app works & how to set up Semantic Kernel, with the and Azure OpenAI. Now that you understand the code, let’s look at the demo application. Here is the link to the GitHub repo. Use case As a reminder, we are building a customer support chatbot for our fictional outdoor sporting equipment company. We want to be able to answer commo...
How to enhance your chatbot so it can retrieve data from multiple data sources & orchestrate its own plan with C# Semantic Kernel, planner & Azure OpenAI – part 2 (demo app implementation)
In this multi-part series, Jordan Bean shares how to enhance a chatbot to retrieve data from multiple data sources and orchestrate plans with C# Semantic Kernel, planner, and Azure Open AI. In the previous post, we discussed how the RAG pattern isn’t enough to answer complex user questions. We talked about using Semantic Kernel to orchestrate AI calls can allow AI to generate its own plan for answering questions from various data sources. In my GitHub repo, I have a sample application that demonstrates this idea. Azure Architecture In this example, all the APIs & web apps are hosted in Azure Con...
How to enhance your chatbot so it can retrieve data from multiple data sources & orchestrate its own plan with C# Semantic Kernel, planner & Azure OpenAI – part 1
In this multi-part series, Jordan Bean shares how to enhance a chatbot to retrieve data from multiple data sources and orchestrate plans with C# Semantic Kernel, planner, and Azure Open AI. As discussed in the previous post about Azure OpenAI, using the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern is a simple & effective way to enable Azure OpenAI to “chat with your data”. This pattern enables you to search your data with Azure Cognitive Search (a search engine), retrieve relevant snippets of information from your data, then add that additional information to your prompts to the Azure OpenAI service to...
Configuration of Data Movement between On-prem or private network to Azure Cloud
In this post, Yanzhong Liang (Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect) and Todd Shain (United Healthcare Group) share some learnings from the field, moving data between environments with Azure Data Factory. In this article, we will take a look at how to transfer files between your on-premises or private network and Azure cloud storage, automatically. Consider a scenario where researchers need to securely transfer small or large files, like databases, from virtual machines to Azure cloud storage for archiving and backup purposes. They also need to download result files or data to local machines, then upload t...
Effective Kubernetes for JakartaEE and Microprofile Developers
In this post, David Minkovski explores some best practices to get your deployment up and running on Kubernetes and Azure. Motivation Kubernetes has become one of the most loved solutions for managing containers. But can you tell me why people love it? Because it runs magic containers (essentially what you want) where you want. Whether on-premises or in the cloud (Azure), Kubernetes enables engineering teams to ship containers and scale and manage deployments and clusters easily. Let’s look at some of those benefits some other time, OK? I am sure you will find plenty of resources out there explaining why...
Azure DevOps Workload Identity Federation
With the recent arrival of the Public preview of Workload identity federation for Azure Pipelines, you may be wondering how to efficiently migrate dozens or even hundreds of ARM Service Connections to take advantage of these benefits. In this post, Emmanuel Knafo dives right in. Updating Your Azure DevOps ARM Service Connections To Use The Recommended Workload Identity Federation With the recent arrival of the Public preview of Workload identity federation for Azure Pipelines, you may be wondering how to efficiently migrate my dozens or even hundreds of ARM Service Connections to take advantage of these ...
Part 5 – Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process
John Folberth and Joe Fitzgerald share sample guidance for developing and deploying an Azure Data Factory into multiple environments. Introduction Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 This section will build on that and include how to build/deploy larger Data Factories which leverage Azure Resource Manager Linked Templates for deployment. When Linked Templates Are Required Typically, users will not desire to use linked templates; however, there are explicit limitations of a single ARM template which may require one to dep...
Configuring Azure Blob Trigger Identity Based Connection
So want to connect your blob triggered function to a storage account, but you don’t want to put your connection string or secrets into the configuration? Andrew Redman explores how to do it in this blog post. What’s the problem? You want to connect your blob triggered function to a storage account, but you don’t want to put your connection string or secrets into the configuration. Prior to Azure Blobs extension 5.0.0, this was your only option, but not anymore. With these later versions you can now connect to your storage account using a managed identity. Here are the simple steps involved to make thi...
Part 4 – Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process
John Folberth and Joe Fitzgerald share sample guidance for developing and deploying an Azure Data Factory into multiple environments. Background This post is the next post in the series Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process. This also happens to overlap and is included in the series on YAML Pipelines. All code snippets and final templates can be found out on my GitHub TheYAMLPipelineOne. For the actual data factory, we will leverage my adf_pipelines_yaml_ci_cd repository. Introduction After reading parts 1-3 on Unlock the Power of Azure D...
Programmatically Create SAS tokens in .NET
Andrew Redman explores how to programmatically create SAS tokens using .NET. Introduction In today's digital landscape, data security and controlled access are critical concerns for businesses. Azure Blob Storage is a popular cloud storage solution, allowing you to store and manage unstructured data. To safeguard your data while granting controlled access to authorized users, one effective approach is to generate Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens programmatically in .NET. In this blog post, we'll explore how to create SAS tokens in .NET, to enhance the security of your Azure Blob Storage. ...
Part 3 – Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process
John Folberth and Joe Fitzgerald share sample guidance for developing and deploying an Azure Data Factory into multiple environments. Introduction To see a complete introduction to this blog series, including links to all the other parts, please follow the link below: Part 1 - Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process Part 3 of the blog series will focus on: Access to all files is in GitHub. The YAML Pipeline Structure To create the YAML pipeline for publishing data factory artifacts and then deploying those art...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Practices for Scaling Templates
John Folberth explores what is considered "good practices" when looking to leverage one repository consisting of YAML templates in this blog series. Introduction This article is part of a larger series on Azure DevOps Pipelines regarding leveraging YAML templating. As part of this series, I have had numerous requests or questions around what is considered "good practices" when looking to leverage one repository consisting of YAML templates. Objective The objective on what we are trying to achieve is create a structure by which we can create a task, job, stage, or variable template once and let...
Part 2 – Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process
John Folberth and Joe Fitzgerald share sample guidance for developing and deploying an Azure Data Factory into multiple environments. Introduction To see a complete introduction to this blog series, including links to all the other parts, please follow the link below: Part 1 - Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process Part 2 of the blog series will focus on: Configure Azure Data Factory Source Control After you have the Azure resources created Launch the Azure Data Factory Studio for the development instance, adf-demo-dev-eastus-001...
Load testing your applications using Azure Load Testing, JMeter and GitHub Actions
Dominique St-Amand shares an introduction on JMeter concepts and goes on to create a basic test plan to load test a sample application and run it through a GitHub Action workflow. I’ve been working with more customers that are starting to take testing (unit, integration, end to end and load testing) more seriously. You may ask, “Dom, really? I thought testing was trivial”. Unfortunately not. As we’re entering an era where businesses are producing software like never before, relatively speaking, these businesses are not software companies. They are seeking to prioritize the speedy creation of business value...
Part 1 – Unlock the Power of Azure Data Factory: A Guide to Boosting Your Data Ingestion Process
John Folberth and Joe Fitzgerald share sample guidance for developing and deploying an Azure Data Factory into multiple environments. Introduction In the fast-paced world of cloud architecture, securely collecting, ingesting, and preparing data for health care industry solutions has become an essential requirement. And that's where Azure Data Factory (ADF) comes in. As an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) cloud service, ADF empowers you to scale-out serverless data integration and data transformation with ease. Imagine being able to effortlessly create data-driven workflows that orchestrate data movem...
The Art of HTTP Connection Pooling: How to Optimize Your Connections for Peak Performance
Ramakrishna Thanniru, Engineering, Optum / United Health Group Pete Tian, Sr Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft Migrating an on-prem system to the public cloud can be a daunting task. While many companies have successfully made the transition, some have struggled with unexpected issues. One common problem is the sudden decrease in transaction speed, which can lead to system crashes and frustrating downtime. The Ops team may find themselves scratching their heads when faced with messages such as "timeout exceptions" or "HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout" in the logs, unsure of how to address these issues. As ...
Hosting Option for OpenEMR in Azure
Cloud Solution Architect, Monu Bambroo, spotlights OpenEMR and various ways to host the service in Azure. OpenEMR is the most popular open source electronic health records and medical practice management solution. OpenEMR is designed to be used by healthcare providers and organizations of all sizes, from small clinics to large hospitals. It is a web-based application that can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection, making it easy for providers to access patient records from anywhere. Open EMR software is also fully customizable, allowing providers to tailor it to their specific needs and...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Leveraging Stages with YAML Objects
John Folberth continues his series on Azure DevOps Pipelines, by Leveraging Stages with YAML Objects. Introduction By now we’ve covered the basics on tasks, jobs, stages, environments, variables and templates for jobs and tasks. It is now time to move towards stage templates. Additionally, to assist with templating we will cover one way to leverage YAML objects which is a key tool when templating up and keeping your pipelines DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). To follow along I am leveraging non-ADO code in from Azure IaC Flavors and YAML templates from TheYAMLPipelineOne Stages Recapping from a previous...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions
John Folberth continues his series on Azure DevOps Pipelines by taking a deep dive into If Expressions and Conditions. At this stage in the series we’ve talked about tasks, jobs, stages, how to template them, and how to leverage environments in variables. This post will attempt to cover some basics around using if and conditions in your YAML Pipelines. If Expressions If expressions are simple and easy enough in YAML pipelines, they are a powerful tool. In my experience I have leveraged if expressions to: The key to unlocking their power is the understanding that an if expression will e...
Developer Support and MSDN/Visual Studio Subscription Benefits
Visual Studio provides valuable subscription benefits for building software and creating test environments. This includes access to installation media, developer tools, online training, Azure/Office 365 subscriptions, and even basic support. Since most development teams have access to MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions, businesses will frequently ask: Why would we need to add Developer Support as part of a Unified Support Contract? It is important to understand the limited scope of support benefits included with a Visual Studio Subscription. Some VS subscriptions include incident support made available to...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Tasks, Jobs, Stages and more!
John Folberth recently contributed a series of Azure DevOps posts in our Tech Community covering a range of Pipeline topics, including Template Tasks, Jobs, Environments, Variables, Jobs, and Stages. There is a lot of great information, so be sure to check these out. Azure DevOps Pipelines: Tasks, Jobs, Stages When starting in Azure DevOps Pipelines one can immediately become inundated with terminology that may seem foreign or question what pipeline structure will lead to the most flexibility and streamlining of their build/deployment process. This post will focus on the hierarchy of Tasks->Jobs-Sta...
Deploying Kubernetes Cluster on Azure VMs using kubeadm, CNI and containerd
Cenk Caglar and Toros Gökkurt walk through how to deploy Kubernetes clusters on Azure VMs using kubeadm, CNI and containerd. Although managed Kubernetes clusters are great, ready for production, and secure, they hide most of the administrative operations. I remember the days I was working with Kubernetes the hard way repository to deploy on Azure Virtual Machines and I was thinking that there should be an easier way to deploy your cluster. One of the well-known methods is kubeadm which is announced at 2018. Since then, it is part of the Kubernetes and has its own GitHub page. When we were studying for K...
Azure DevOps – Leveraging Pipeline Decorators for Custom Process Automation
In this post, Jin Lee explores how Azure DevOps Pipeline Decorators can bridge the gap in a cloud environment with a customer's existing security processes on their on-premises IIS server. Background In the recent pandemic, health institutions all across the world have been pushed to their limits on about every facet. Through this, many such institutions have begun to reprioritize their modernization efforts around their cloud infrastructure to support increasing demands and hedge against uncertainty. As institutions are migrating their existing workloads into the cloud, a common challenge they are faced ...
Introduce RBAC in PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Pete Tian spotlights RBAC for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. As more enterprises modernize identity management by using RBAC and simply authentication with Single Sign-On, the efforts of maintaining separate sets of username/password for every legacy database instance is still excessive operational overhead that is considerable for IT admins. Even worse, once the databases migrated to public cloud with public IP exposure, the legacy identity management system became a security nightmare. The voice demanding integration of RBAC / RDBMS access management has been crescendo in recent years, and finally a solu...
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL w/ React QuickStart
John Folberth and Daniel Kim dive into Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL and React with this overview and QuickStart. At Ignite 2022, Microsoft made an announcement for PostgreSQL in Azure CosmosDB! What is Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL? Azure Cosmos DB - is a fast, distributed NoSQL database. Scalable with 99.999% availability! (Get started) PostgreSQL - Here are some reasons why you might want to use PostgreSQL – Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL has combined these two technologies and extended with Citus extension to bring distributed tables for PostgreSQL. Combining Azure Cosmos DB...
Tracking Azure History with Azure Resource Graph
John Folberth explores how Azure Resource Graph can help you can track environmental changes that span multiple subscriptions and resources. When administrating an Azure environment, or any environment really, one will most likely find a way to track changes that were introduced. There are a number of ways to do this. Within Azure can query the Subscription or Resource Group Deployment, the downside though is this approach is limited to just the scope you are querying on. What if this is a larger organization with multiple subscriptions? You could also rely on a well-established CI/CD pipeline, a third-par...
Deep Dive into Social Media Analytics
Daniel Kim shares a two-part series exploring how to use Social Media, Azure Synapse & Power BI to make Insightful decisions with Social Media Analytics. Imagine you are a product developer for a healthcare company who wants to find trending topics around your recently developed product - or - you are a researcher for a company who wants to search around what is trending on the market to come up with new innovative products. You’ll first need to find a way to scrape different news sites and search popular social media platform, like Twitter, to find trending topics. Also imagine, after all the sc...
Learn, connect, explore – stay at the forefront of rapidly evolving technologies!
Looking for a way to stay current and get hands-on experience with Azure? Now you can get notified about events—from local hacks, workshops, and training sessions to virtual meetups and global conferences. Get the latest articles, documentation, and events from Microsoft.Source—the curated monthly developer community newsletter. Learn about new technologies and find opportunities to connect with other developers online and locally. Interested in learning more about Kubernetes or just want to get started developing apps with Azure using Python, Java, .NET and more? Get the...
Getting secrets from Key Vault in YAML pipeline
Andrew Redman spotlights how to use a Key Vault Task inside an Azure DevOps pipeline to automate a deployment using secrets. Keeping your connection strings and secrets secure is not necessarily only a concern of just one type of industry. The best practice would be to keep security at the top of your mind regardless of if you are working on an app for a company in the Healthcare space or Finance, Retail, etc….Azure Key Vault can help in doing just that. If you have ever created an Azure App Service or Azure Function App that uses app settings, then you have dealt with the problem of how you ...
Azure AD OAuth client credential flow with custom certificate walk-through
Nicola Delfino demonstrates how to use a certificate to request an access token to Azure Active Directory, using the OAuth 2.0 client credential flow You can use the OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant specified in RFC 6749, to access web-hosted resources by using the identity of an application. This type of grant is commonly used for server-to-server interactions that must run in the background, without immediate interaction with a user. The OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant flow permits a web service (confidential client) to use its own credentials, instead of impersonating a user, to authenticate whe...
The Microsoft Planetary Computer
Susan Leighton spotlights the Planetary Computer, combining a multi-petabyte catalog of global environmental data with intuitive APIs, a flexible scientific environment that allows users to answer global questions about that data, and applications that put those answers in the hands of conservation stakeholders. In Microsoft’s 2021 Environmental Sustainability Report, in addition to discussing the early progress on commitments around being a carbon negative, water positive, and a zero-waste company by 2030, we stated that we would build a Planetary Computer. So, what is it? This blog contains a consolidate...
Express Design – AppDev on Steroids
Tahir Naveed spotlights Express Design, a new way to quickly get started with Power Apps by instantly transforming your visual design into an app. As soon as the announcement of Express Design came out on Microsoft Build, I wanted to get my hands dirty with it. Here is a quick tutorial on how it works. Express Design (Preview) is a new way to quickly get started with Power Apps by instantly transforming your visual design into an app. App design can be in the form of paper forms, whiteboard sketches, or Figma files without the knowledge of the database or any programming language. Design an app: ...
DevOps Fragility, Antipatterns, and Consequences
Mark Eisenberg and Keith Anderson spotlight app architecture, organizational structure, and testing responsibilities and the importance of how these areas can improve or hinder the effectiveness of DevOps practices. Overview DevOps was born from the idea of applying development practices and tooling to the creation and management of IT infrastructure. The specific practice that caught the attention of these IT experts was Agile. They saw the promise of applying iterative development to infrastructure automation in a practice that would come to be known as infrastructure as code. From that simple idea, ...
Kubernetes and Challenges in Cloud-Agnostic Strategies
Stephen Abdo and Pete Tian examine cloud-agnostic strategies and explore common challenges and misconceptions. Overview and Industry Trends Over the past several years there has been an increased focus on adopting cloud-agnostic strategies. Some common reasons to do this are to avoid becoming dependent on any one cloud provider and the freedom to pursue a best-of-breed ecosystem. Kubernetes is one technology that has been used to accomplish these goals. Microsoft has even been making more and more PaaS services available in Kubernetes to aid in that effort. However, we sometimes see customers who are n...
How To Batch Importing Azure DevOps Work Items Using Azure DevOps APIs and C#
Kyle Johnson and Sash Kavalaparambil explore batch import for Azure DevOps work items using REST APIs. While you can upload a CSV with work items into Azure DevOps, there is so much flexibility you get when you import work items using the Azure DevOps API. What you need You can do this by creating an app registration and using MSAL to authenticate but to keep it simple for this blog post, we will create a Personal Access Token (PAT) then use that PAT token in the code. Steps to create a PAT token - Use personal access tokens - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Docs Below is a sample CSV file. Now let’s...
DevOps Nirvana – Part 1
Randy Pagels takes you on a DevOps journey to frame up the way an organization would foster a strong DevOps culture. Contributions made to this blog post by Kyle Burns, Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect and Able Wang, former Principal Cloud Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft, his contributions and skills will be forever appreciated. During this blog series I will be taking you on a DevOps journey to frame up the way an organization would foster a strong DevOps culture. I’ve referenced this fantastic blog written by Niels (Nells) Talens on the “AgileThings” website. Source: AgileThings. This blog is ...
Software Carbon Intensity?
Tammy McClellan is an advocate for sustainability and the Green Software Foundation (GSF). Learn more about how developers are putting this passion into practice. When Microsoft announced of the Green Software Foundation (GSF), I jumped at the opportunity to join the initiative and went all in - joining 3 out of 4 working groups. As a developer and a sustainability advocate, I’m keen to understand and help reduce the amount of carbon we emit as a farm, but also in my job working with software and customers. Back in October of 2021, I participated in a Global Hackathon for Sustainability and got 3 day...
Implementing Power BI Row-level security (RLS) at the user level
Bill Bevan spotlights row-level security at the user level with Power BI. Have you ever had to restrict data, but didn’t know how to filter per user? Using Power BI’s Row-level Security (RLS) is a great way to accomplish this. In this short blog you will be introduced to a scenario on how to do just that. Note: The data used in this blog was downloaded from the ‘Microsoft Contoso BI Demo Dataset for Retail Industry’ that can be found here. Implementation of this solution is done in three stages, as follows and detailed below: Identify Source The following sample is a subset of...
Performance regression tests at Microsoft Security
In this post, Maor Frankel shares insights about performance regression testing in Microsoft Security. During the past 6 years, a significant amount of my work has gone into improving the performance of the Web application I work on. This has been the case at my previous work at Outbrain and at my current position in the front end (FE) core team at Microsoft Security. The typical approach to testing performance in similar cases is to add logs from the client code that measure user flows you want to track (aka RUM, Real User Monitoring). For instance, you might add a start page load marker every ti...
Exploring Service Bus with Fantasy Football
Chris Tjoumas explores the power and flexibility of Azure Service Bus through some fun with Fantasy Football. For the past 15 years, I’ve been playing fantasy football and probably spend too much time each Sunday during the regular season watching every single game. Rather than trying to convince me to do other things such as finish my home improvement projects or visit a winery (rather than football?!?), my wife decided to join me instead and she created her own women’s league. After several years, her league disbanded, but to keep her and I sharing this hobby of mine, she said that I should create a head...
Hybrid Model for GitHub and Azure DevOps – Enjoy the best of both worlds
Shany Wiesel explores the benefits of a hybrid model using GitHub Enterprise and Azure DevOps. We often hear repeating conversations with Enterprise customers who have invested in Azure DevOps and have great working dev sec ops processes and success enabled by Azure DevOps: While we know that Microsoft is investing in Both products, Azure DevOps and GitHub Enterprise, we also know that more options for Cross Service avenues are being introduced. This opens endless possibilities to consider the “what, when and why.” Keeping in mind that GitHub enterprise is constantly being introduced a...
Azure Container Apps
Monu Bambroo explores Azure Container Apps -- a serverless container service built for microservice applications and robust autoscaling capabilities without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure. Microsoft recently announced Azure Container Apps in Preview – a new serverless container platform. The idea behind this offering is to run your microservices style applications without needing to focus on the infrastructure and is built on top of industry standard Kubernetes. This platform provides value added services like out of the box Ingress, Auto Scale, Dapr integration with features like pubs/sub...
Data modeling for Power BI
Data Modeling is used to connect multiple data sources in Power BI tool using a relationship. A relationship defines how data sources are connected with each other. In order for you to get the most out of your data it is important to follow several Power BI data modeling best practices.
Marketplace Office Hours (Business and Technical)- Register Now for February Sessions
The commercial marketplace services team in Azure engineering has upcoming (February 2022) Marketplace Office Hours on business and technical topics; providing publishers with the information and resources to successfully publish their solutions to the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace.
Marketplace Office Hours (Business and Technical)- Register Now
The commercial marketplace services team in Azure engineering has upcoming Marketplace Office Hours on business and technical topics; providing publishers with the information and resources to successfully publish their solutions to the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. Register for one of the following Marketplace Office hours sessions now.
Community is one variable of the Certification equation
A learn-it-all, growth mindset is critical for personal growth and development in addition to building a successful team.
Workshop Spotlight: GitHub
If you are looking to build your team's expertise with GitHub, there is no shortage of resources available. This post is to spotlight a few of the popular workshops available to organizations looking to build expertise with GitHub.
Deconstructing Azure PowerShell APIs with Fiddler
There are a ton of great PowerShell libraries out there that are super easy to use. Most of these just sit on top of standard REST APIs and abstract all the details away. When you are building code to use REST APIs, it’s easy to use Fiddler and a PowerShell API to generate your own sample of a working request payload.
Workshop Spotlight: Secure DevOps – Application Security Principles and Practices
Secure software requires design well beyond parameter and infrastructure security. It starts with getting developers on board with important concepts and considerations as the code is being written—long before it’s released.
Getting Started with GPT-3 in Power Platform
Now you can write natural language to generate Power Fx formulas and use them to build your app in Power Platform.
Getting acquainted with Azure Synapse SQL Serverless
Synapse SQL Serverless was built for large-scale data processing. The service provides fault-tolerance and enables high reliability even for long-running queries involving very large datasets.
Getting Started with Graph API and Teams
In this post, I’ll look at how to setup an app registration and move some of these concepts into a custom application that uses Graph API. We'll build on an existing Graph Tutorial, review some concepts, and add support for sending a chat message in Teams.
Getting Started with Graph API and Graph Explorer
Some SDKs may be better tailored for a particular environment or language, but just about everything supports basic REST calls. That’s what makes Microsoft Graph API so attractive. Not only does it provide simple REST interfaces for all kinds of Microsoft products and services, but it’s relatively easy to work with.
Workshop Spotlight: Developing Cross-Platform Web Apps with ASP.NET Core
.NET Core: Developing Cross-Platform Web Apps with ASP.NET Core WorkshopPLUS establishes fundamentals of ASP.NET Core before diving into full-stack development techniques.
How to deploy Angular app to Azure App Service running Linux from GitHub
This sample demonstrates how to deploy, from GitHub, an Angular single page application (SPA) to Azure App Service running Node.js on Linux. A continuous delivery/continuous integration pipeline will be also put in place with a GitHub Action.
Deploying an Azure APIM Self-Hosted Gateway
With so many customization and integrations options, organizations can leverage these powerful Azure services for a variety of architectures and applications. Self-hosted gateways help improve performance, while ensuring secure and efficient API traffic.
Workshop Spotlight: DevOps Fundamentals
The DevOps fundamentals workshop introduces the business value of DevOps then walks the attendees through the essential practices required for a healthy implementation of DevOps within an Organization.
Using COPY command with Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Dedicated Pool
Azure Synapse Analytics includes many features and capabilities, among those is the COPY command which makes copying data into a data warehouse very easy. This video will walk you though using the COPY command to import data into a data warehouse table for use by data consumers.
Integration with On-Premises Data Sources in Azure Synapse Analytics
Today many organizations are cloud hybrid in nature so they need to read from and write to on-premises data stores including file systems and relational databases.
Adding source control to Azure Synapse Analytics Studio
Most users of Azure Synapse Analytics will need to use it within a team environment, as such using source control to handle multiple users writing code and building processes in the service will be needed. Thankfully Synapse Analytics Studio includes built-in support for 2 of the most popular Git service providers – GitHub & Azure DevOps.
To B2B or to B2C?
While one uses B to signify it’s focus on business partnerships, while the other uses C for consumers, at the end of the day either can be used to accomplish roughly the same access. My intent here is to focus on what I see as the fundamental difference; one that is most likely to drive the appropriate choice of technology.
No Batch No Problem
This post will go over how to expand sub-properties of an OData REST API request without using a batch request. This will be useful in SharePoint 2013+ On-Premise environments where the batch request is not available.
Dangling DNS and Subdomain Takeovers
This post explores what is commonly referred to as a “Dangling DNS Subdomain Takeover” and why you never delete a resource that backs a CNAME entry in your DNS without first redirecting or removing the CNAME record first.
Calling a Helper API in an Azure APIM Inbound Policy
With Azure APIM, you can completely control how developers consume your services. Through policies, you can transform data, validate requests, integrate backends, and probably cook the world's best cheeseburger. This powerful feature enables complex systems and architectures to be seamlessly connected, ensuring your data and process stay safe.
Managing ADX Data with .NET Core and Azure B2C
In this article, I wanted to show how you can create a custom .NET Core web app to access and manage ADX data. For additional demonstration, I showed how to authenticate with Azure B2C, leverage Dependency Injection and Caching, as well as integrate with a custom API for filtering.
Calling an API in Power Apps Portals using JavaScript
The Microsoft Power Apps Platform allow you to build powerful and stylish applications quickly, all from within the browser. By integrating your business systems and APIs, you can expose functionality to users quickly, secure it with your favorite Identity Provider, and have something to show off at the next family reunion.
Grow your business through the Microsoft commercial marketplace
We have upcoming business and technical webinars designed to help you scale your business through the Microsoft commercial marketplace and the Azure government marketplace.
PowerApps – Filtering BrowseGallery by Choice Field Values
After researching, it is clear that the Choice fields are not seen as Text fields (despite SharePoint treating them as Text fields). So the Search ignores the “Track” Choice field.
Cloud Economics
In this article, we will explore how to track costs from these 3 cloud service providers. We will also carve out a strategy to estimate on-premise costs.
Connecting an Azure Logic App to a local Web API
In this article, I’ll show you how you can test your Logic Apps with your on-prem systems using a few cool tools and services.
Working with Azure Storage Blobs with a Java Azure Function
As a long-time C# developer, working with Java is a big change. It’s a completely new way to package files, include dependencies, and host applications. Luckily, the code syntax is very similar. Hopefully, this blog helps anyone looking to make a similar transition and work with Azure Functions using multiple languages.
Importing an OpenAPI API into Azure API Management Service
By leveraging Azure API Management for administration, developers can quickly import their applications and manage their systems on a global level. Through the Azure portal or code, you can get your APIs into a managed environment and help your users develop their applications.
How to Post a File to an Azure Function in 3 Minutes
Recently, I needed to upload a file to Azure Functions, and found a hard time finding a blog on the easiest/fastest way to do it. So, I decided to write this quick article to show you how. And I think I can do it under 3 minutes!
Setting up for Azure B2C development
The following describes some techniques, tools and approaches I found useful when developing applications with Azure AD B2C. The first part deals with setting up a newly created B2C tenant using the Azure portal only. The second part deals with developing custom journeys (Identity Experience Framework) xml policies.
Reducing SNAT Port consumption in Azure App Services
If you find yourself struggling with SNAT ports using Azure App Services and your destination is an Azure service that supports service endpoints, regional VNET integration with Service Endpoints or Private Endpoints can provide a fairly simple way to allow these requests to use an internal, optimized route and avoid SNAT port limitations.
MicroFrontends With Blazor WebAssembly
In this post we were able to demonstrate how to maintain different components as separate libraries which could be imported into the main shell in order to allow modular distributed development.
SharePoint Workflow transformation to Power Automate
The SharePoint Workflow transformation to Power Automate workshop is targeted toward a Business and IT audience and focuses on workflow assessment and migration guidance to Power Automate in a discovery and hands-on learning event.
There’s more to Power Platform than low-code/no-code development
Power Platform is incredibly powerful and capable. If you are new to Power Platform, there are a lot of great reasons to check it out, but if you are already an organization using Office 365, you may be missing out.
Claims encryption for B2C tokens
Once you sign in and consent, you should see TokenEncryption API in your Enterprise Apps. You will then be able to register your own client applications (recipients of encrypted tokens), set their API Permission to access the Token Encryption API with decrypt application permission, and use client credentials to request a token.
Sample script to transform SharePoint Migration Tool reports
This is a simple script that transforms SPMT reports into folders, broken out by website so people working on specific pages can easily see which action items pertain to them.
Generate a Service Bus SAS Token and Manage Token renewal using Azure Runbooks
This article covers the process of generating a service bus token using PowerShell, using an azure runbook to cover token generation and renewal, and the how process can be automated and managed with a CI/CD pipeline.
Microsoft Identity Platform which OAuth flow should I use?
Microsoft Identity Platform: which OAuth2 flow should I use? My non-prescriptive one-page guide in choosing the right auth flow for every situation.
How to Surface a Classic Solution in a Modern Page
This post will go over how to surface a classic SharePoint HTML/JS/CSS solution in a modern page or teams tab.
Collect and Automate Diagnostic Actions with Azure App Services
Troubleshooting production systems is often a balance between restoring services quickly and trying to collect enough information to isolate what caused the issue. For complex application issues, it’s almost always helpful to capture a memory dump.
Azure DevOps Services: Essentials – Git with Visual Studio and VS Code
The Azure DevOps Services: Essentials – Git with Visual Studio WorkshopPLUS is an instructor-led training course that provides participants with the fundamental knowledge that is required to use Git with Visual Studio. It provides detailed guidance for working with version control, work items, automated builds, and deployments.
Introduction to Supervised Machine Learning
Machine learning is a very powerful tool for businesses and researchers to create predictions for data problems. However, there are many steps to creating models and not every model is suited for each problem. We have to use a combination of human judgment and computational techniques to create the right model.
Scaling User experiences with Micro frontends
Users expect software to be approachable and familiar on any device they use. Modern user experiences are cross platform spanning the web, apps, and operating systems putting users in the center.
Go and C# Comparison
In this post, App. Dev. Manager Vishal Saroopchand showcases similarities and differences on important topics for C# developers learning Go.
Taste of Premier: Azure Security Center
Security is foundational for Azure. Take advantage of multi-layered security provided across physical data centers, infrastructure, and operations.
Measuring Concurrent Jobs Over Time
If you are looking to move your Azure DevOps Server or TFS implementation to Azure DevOps Services, you will find that the licensing and pricing around concurrent jobs has changed.
Using OAuth2 OBO with Azure AD B2C
This sample uses a custom web service (B2BOBOWeb) to provide a token endpoint, which handles the Extension Grant requests and communicates with B2C to respond with a valid response (access token). It uses a specific B2C tenant configured with custom journeys to handle this communication.
Securing Blazor WebAssembly Application With Azure Active Directory
In this post, Consultants Wael Kdouh and Marius Rochon shows how to secure Blazor WebAssembly Applications with Azure Active Directory.
Microsoft Design Inclusivo
O Design Inclusivo não apenas abre nossos produtos e experiências para mais pessoas com uma gama maior de habilidades como também reflete como as pessoas realmente são. Todos nós estamos evoluindo, mudando e se adaptando ao mundo ao seu redor todos os dias. Queremos que nossos projetos reflitam essa diversidade.
Microsoft Inclusive Design
Designing for inclusivity not only opens up our products and experiences to more people with a wider range of abilities. It also reflects how people really are. All humans are growing, changing, and adapting to the world around them every day. We want our designs to reflect that diversity.
GitHub Actions Overview
In this post, App Dev Managers Bernard Apolinario, Sujith Nair, and Latha Natarajan gives a thorough overview of GitHub Actions.
Opening an Incident Using Microsoft Premier Online, now Services Hub
Microsoft Services Hub is a secured online portal exclusively available for Premier and Unified support customers. The site provides a wealth of support resources to help you troubleshoot issues and stay knowledgeable about Microsoft technologies.
What’s In A Name?
Productivity and efficiency (pronounced developer happiness) are hinged on reducing one's cognitive overhead; if I have to stop what I’m doing to process why something is the way it is, there's a chance that the design was flawed. Norman Doors exist everywhere; let’s get rid of them a name at a time.
Extending Teams with Broadcast Messaging
One of the common and important scenarios for many organizations these days is the necessity of sending a message - or even an alert - to all the users across the company. This is also called “broadcast messaging” or “proactive messaging”.
How Microsoft helps customers adopt Azure through developer education
In this post, we review how Microsoft is helping our customers achieve tech intensity by providing a wide array of Azure learning opportunities to constantly build, maintain and strengthen the cloud capabilities of their developers and IT staff.
How to Utilize gRPC-Web From a Blazor WebAssembly Application
It is currently impossible to implement the gRPC HTTP/2 spec in the browser because there are no browser APIs with enough fine-grained control over requests. Well the good news is that gRPC-Web is here for the rescue!
5 Super Useful Azure DevOps Extensions
Thanks in part to Microsoft's recent embrace of open source principals there is a large marketplace of community driven extensions available.
Azure Private Link vs. Azure Service Endpoint for App Services
In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Hanna compares Azure Private Links and Azure service Endpoints for App Services.
How to Debug and Step Into Service Fabric SDK Source Code
In this blog, Premier Consultant Kurt Schenk shows how to debug into the source code of the Service Fabric SDK which is used to develop Reliable Services and Reliable Actors.
How To Detect Unsupported Browsers Under a Blazor WebAssembly Application?
I recently ran into an issue where running a Blazor WebAssembly application under unsupported browsers would simply get stuck on the loading page. Whereas older browsers are supported under the “Server Side” model, it would be a much better experience to present the user with a more meaningful indicator that the browser is not supported.
Maintain projects with different SharePoint Framework versions using Azure Container Registry
Azure Container Registry (ACR) is a managed Docker registry service based on the open source Docker Registry 2.0. ACR is the ideal choice if you want to have standard images for all of our developers, shared images with our continuous integration (CI) processes, and manage everything from a single platform and provider.
CI/CD with SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
In this post, App Dev Manager Dhaval Shah shows how to get started with CI/CD for SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
The Importance of Quality Assurance in the Development Life Cycle
Whether it's a software lab or an in-house department that creates its own applications, its reputation can be made or destroyed whenever a product is launched. Therefore, the concern with software quality becomes increasingly essential for any company that wants to stand out in the market.
How to Get Workflow Definitions Using the REST API
This post will give an example of getting all 2010 and 2013 workflow definitions, using the gd-sprest library to interact with the REST API.
Manage Service Bus Queue messages with Python
In this post, Big Data Consultant Rakhi Guha shows how to get started with Python scripting to manage Service Bus Queue messages.
App Registration of .NET Application in Azure AD
Now that we have validated that we are able to query the presence for the particular user, we proceed to building a tool to further validate the Presence API query and handling the various output. In preparation for our Windows .Net Forms application, we must Register our application in our Azure Active Directory admin center.
Teams Presence Prototype in .NET
In this segment, my goal is to get the Teams presence in a stand-alone application. In this app, we will do the following: Connect to the Graph Beta API programmatically. Use the Client ID from my App Registration and validate the permissions. Read my presence and display the presence retrieved. Verify that the solution is displaying Status.
Using the Microsoft Graph Explorer
Working from home has created new opportunities and challenges. In the following guide, the Microsoft Graph Explorer is used to access the Teams presence indicators. This is one of several blog posts leading towards the creation a visual indicator using LED RGB string for Teams presence in a home office scenario.
Upgrading to the New Work Item Form in Azure DevOps
This blog post will highlight a case from the field to shed some light on what changes are made to the work item form, also known as the 'Best-effort transformation'. We'll walkthrough a case from the field where the custom work item was very different after upgrade.
Managing Cloud Ready .NET App Secrets in Visual Studio
Secrets need to be handled with care and this is the responsibility of every developer. We’ve all read those news reports of someone accidently checking a production password into source control only to find out the next day that their credit card has been maxed out.
Power Apps Build Tools for Azure DevOps
Given the dire need expressed by many of our enterprise customers for a complete ALM and DevOps support in to the Microsoft Power Platform I felt like writing this blog to give a very quick high-level overview of the tool and its capabilities.
Simplified Automated QA Testing on Azure DevOps
Setting up automated testing can be complex, but I wanted to build out an automated testing system that would be simple to understand and implement, yet cover most of the basic needs of test automation.
Multi-vendor Service Level Agreement (SLA) model based on Business Availability
App Dev Manager Dipanjan Ghanti shares an example of how to frame a multi-vendor SLA based on business availability. Introduction Enterprises often run business critical applications that are supported by multiple vendors. While each vendor takes responsibility for their component’s availability, the need to tie it up with the overall business service availability is frequently overlooked. In the traditional service level models, each organization has its own target service levels and is strictly accountable for their availability, regardless of whether their unavailability resulted in the loss of the bus...
Approach for Merging Dynamics CRM Solutions with DevOps implementations.
How do I merge solutions in CRM? How do I perform feature-based deployment in Dynamics CRM? These are a few frequently asked questions when I am presenting DevOps for CRM talks or asked about my post on “Continuous Integration, Deployment and Test Automation for Dynamics CRM.
Productivity taking a hit lately? Give OMG a try.
The right productivity software tools can make life much easier. I use Microsoft 365: Outlook for PC for calendar and email, Planner to track work, and MyAnalytics to gain insights. Here are some tips to get organized.
Monitoring & Alerting – Operations in the Cloud
Application Insights monitors the availability, performance, and usage of your web applications. It provides you with deep insights into your application's operations and diagnose errors without waiting for a user to report them. It gives you the ability to continuously improve performance and usability.
Your Ally in Premier
As an ADM, I am expected to be that squeaky wheel that is passionate about doing what is right for you, my customer, in the long run. I am on your side and I take pride in helping you grow to be the best that you can be. This often arises in the form of ensuring you and your developers get the best tools and guidance on app modernization.
Migrate SSRS Subscription Owners with PowerShell
You may find that after you move the content that subscription owners are automatically set to the account used to perform the migration. There is an API you can use to assign a new owner and scripts to list subscriptions owners, but I if you have to do this for a large number of servers, it can be a lot of work.
Using Localization in the Microsoft Healthcare Bot
Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot Service is an extendable SaaS solution to build a powerful industry aware conversational bots that can be leveraged from the PC, Mobile or chat clients like Microsoft Teams.
Azure SQL TDE failures – Activity log Alerts to rescue
The SQL Server connection to the Key Vault can be lost for various reasons of either the SQL Server (updates, backups etc..) or the Key Vault (Key expired, disabled etc.) Luckily Azure provides detailed logging and alerting through Azure Monitor Logs and Alerts.
Application Insights Connector – What happened to it?
In this post, Azure Consultant Nasir Sayed explains integration preferences between Log Analytics and Application Insights.
Looking Back – Rediscovering the Basics of Technology Planning
Agile’s approach to balancing capacity against demand starts from the principal of embracing change. Adaptability is Agile’s superpower. Waterfall projects will have a place for the foreseeable future. The most important thing that an organization can do is define when and how to apply each of the strategies.
DAX Calculation Groups for Time Intelligence
Power BI Premium (Preview), Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Analysis Services 2019 now support Calculation Groups! Why am I so excited? Because this functionality was one of the best capabilities in Multidimensional Analysis Services through Named Sets and Calculated Members.
Moving legacy ASP.NET apps with Windows authentication to Azure App Service (Part 2)
We discuss moving legacy backend services that use Windows authentication over to an Azure App Service, with emphasis on web service stack and authentication & authorization considerations.
Tips & tricks to run a Power Apps hackathon
Power Platform provides a low code approach to developing mobile friendly apps, or to perform business process automation. A Power Platform hackathon can help users ideate and put together a Proof of Concept to validate an approach and demonstrate value quickly.
Resolved JavaScript Promises Can Be Used Multiple Times!
JavaScript Promises are powerful, and they become more powerful once we understand that a "resolved" Promise can be used more than once!
Azure DevOps setting up Repository permissions
As your organization grows, you will start to have many repositories inside of your Azure DevOps projects. Most organizations allow developers to browse and contribute to any repository, and put policies on pull requests for specific branches to protect them.
Using Azure DevOps Pipelines with Redgate to Automate Oracle Database Deployments
In this post, I will cover a basic end to end-to-end example of taking a local Oracle database, setting up a project in a Git repository and using a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to take your database changes from code through to production.
3 Reasons You Should Have Designers in Your Agile Teams
The importance of having designers (user interface & user experience) skills in your agile teams.
Quantum Computing for Software Developers – Part II
In these two parts of my blog entry, I have demonstrated what Superposition and Entanglement mean from a quantum computing perspective. In Part 3, I’ll get into quantum operations!
So You Want to Build an AI Solution?
The most valuable lesson from our recent work was the time invested in identifying opportunities on how best to leverage AI to enhance our customer’s solutions before delving into architectural decisions and proceeding with a proof of concept.
nopCommerce running in Azure (PaaS)
Microsoft and the nopCommerce team has made it incredibly easy for the average computer user to get an e-commerce solution up and running with just a few click. The real beauty in this relationship however, is the power the user inherits post the "click click done" phase.
Control Access to Power Apps and Power Automate with Azure AD Conditional Access Policies
With just a few quick steps using the Azure AD Conditional Access Policy, it is easy to limit access to PowerApps and Power Automate. This quick fix allows time for companies to evaluate the platform, experiment with pilot users, and take the time to implement governance and administration best practices.
Introduction to CMMI Development for Developers
CMMI may seem like overkill, but even on small projects, the knowledge captured by following the process shortens the cycle the longer you are away from the project. Not to mention if you’ve never worked on the project before.
How to Change Azure Monitor Log Agent Workspace Information For All VMs in a Subscription
In this post, Sr. Consultant Tim Omta shows how to change Azure Monitor Log Agent Workspace for all VMs in an Azure Subscription.
In-Memory OLTP Best Practices – Part 2
This is a continuation of our first blog post where we shared our best practices and thoughts around the following key decisions you will make when deploying the In-Memory OLTP solution.
3 Tips for Adding Security to CI/CD Pipelines
When working with customers that are just starting their journey of converting to CI/CD pipelines within Azure DevOps, the initial focus is making sure their current manual build and release processes are automated. Can our pipeline do more? How do we build security steps into the process?
Helping Enterprise Customers Develop High Performant and Scalable Solutions in Azure
This is just one representative example of Premier Developer team helping our customers to develop highly performant and scalable solutions by doing code, design and architectural reviews.
Upgrade Spring Boot App to Java 11 (LTS): What’s to be done in project config and Azure DevOps Pipelines
As one of the most popular open source platforms, Java has accelerated its release cadence to 6 months after the debute of Java 9. Enterprise application systems usually are built upon Long Term Support (LTS) version. The current Java LTS is version 11, although massive systems are lagged in Java 8 which is the previous LTS released in 2015.
Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Software Development Project Management, I Learned from World of Warcraft
As more companies are pursuing their DevOps journey and looking at the union of People, Process, and Products to enable continuous delivery of value to end users, it is important to realize that there is a reason People come first in that list.
5 Azure Services You Should Know About
Microsoft Azure consists of over 100 services to build, deploy, and manage your applications and solutions. With innovative new services and features being added constantly, it can be a challenge to keep up with all the goodness available to you in Azure. Here are five awesome services and features you should know about.
Global Power BI User Group: Tales from the Forum (Video)
Our own Dev Consultant Jorge Segarra answers questions from the Global Power BI User Group on all things Power BI in this video, "Tales from the Forum."
Using Azure App Services with Hybrid Connections
Guidance to help fast track cloud migration and application modernization using App Service hybrid connections to open a whole new world of possibilities.
From a Storm to Order – Part I
The biggest challenge that we face as developers is understanding the problem that we're trying to solve, understanding the business logic that we're trying to implement inside of our code. In my opinion, this challenge has been one of the most significant issues we deal with as software designers and developers.
Microsoft certification during COVID-19 using online exams – You, your space, and your machine
Much of the world is in various stages of stay at home orders. These orders have required the closing of most testing centers thereby disrupting the plans many people had to complete Microsoft certifications at this time. Fortunately, you have the option of taking your exam in your home or other private location by using a proctor.
Azure DevOps and Continuous Learning
Application Development Manager Kelly Wilson demonstrates using Azure DevOps to transform certification knowledge to practitioner knowledge. Introduction Microsoft offers a vast array of certifications designed to increase your knowledge and skills in a wide variety of platforms and architectures, from Azure to Dynamics 365 to the Power Platform. Unfortunately for many of us, taking the certification exam might amount to little more than an academic exercise with very few acquired skills. If you or your company has invested the money and time for you to acquire a certification, that certification shoul...
Azure Active Directory: Automating Guest User Management
Augment built-in Azure AD features using Azure Automation and Microsoft Graph to manage and audit guest users.
Azure API Management Custom Subscription Approval
This guide will walk through how to create a Logic App that will allow for a custom subscription approval flow per product in Azure API Management.
The Journey to a DevOps Culture
Sharing best practices across the enterprise becomes more important and reshaping organizational structure and transforming into modern Agile practices with a DevOps culture, while difficult, will lead to the faster delivery of stable high-quality applications with fewer bugs, less technical debt the ability to more rapidly deliver value.
A How-To Guide For pssdiag and SQL Nexus: Creating a pssdiag Package
In this post, Sr. Consultant Kendal Van Dyke explores pssdiag and SQL Nexus, free tools from Microsoft that help you capture and analyze SQL Server performance data.
Integration of Power Apps with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams and Power Apps together offers your organization a rapid and low-cost app development platform to achieve a quick win in business productivity and efficiency.
Best practices to prepare for a high priority event
How do you best align your team and prepare your services to ensure a successful event? We will walk you through the proven practices to ensure your team executes on your event successfully.
Hands-On Walkthrough (HOW) Sessions: A new way to learn
One of my focuses when I engage with customers is having participants follow along with my live coding exercises, allowing them to practice these methodologies and stay engaged during delivery. This live coding style engagement has proven to be very effective with hands on keyboards, facilitating greater engagement and retention.
WFH DIY Meeting Light Bulb
In this post, Dev Consultant Ben Williams shares his unique solution involving a Wi-Fi enabled Smart LED Light Bulb to avoid interruptions while working from home.
How to retrieve all work items associated with a release pipeline using Azure DevOps API
In this article we are going to learn how to retrieve all work items associated with a release pipeline using the Azure DevOps API.
Tips and Tricks for getting your Microsoft Certification
During the last 12 months, I’ve put a concerted efforted to beefing up my technical chops - I’ve passed 17 Certification Exams. See my LinkedIn profile if you want to see what certs I’ve obtained. I want to share my personal story Tips and Trick on how I did this so it may help you.
Create Content Types in SharePoint
This post will give an example of creating content types in SharePoint. The gd-sprest library will use the SharePoint Configuration helper class to create the content types. This post will focus on the configuration file for creating site and list content types.
Ghost Update Take Two – 64-bit NodeJS
In my previous post, I explained how to deploy Ghost on Azure Web App; however, Ghost v2.25.5 now requires Node.JS 64-bit to support the sharp package v0.22.1. If you followed my initial instructions to create the free App Service, you will notice that this build will break your post images.
Como fazer: Arquivos de Configuração Editáveis
Esse Post vai explicar em alguns passos e exemplos como usar um arquivos JSON de configuração que pode ser customizado para múltiplos ambientes.
Introdução ao Node.js
Segue um simples passo-a-passo para guiá-lo e ensinar como configurar sua aplicação Angular com Visual Studio Code e Node. Esse guia irá ajudá-lo a identificar o que instalar, quais comandos executar em PowerShell e alguns conceitos básicos de por onde começar a construir seu app usando Visual Studio Code.
Azure DevOps Pipelines – Multi-Stage Pipelines and YAML for Continuous Delivery
YAML Pipelines enable you to store your pipeline as code, and Multi-stage YAML pipelines provide the ability to scale this to CI, CD, or the combination of the two.
10 Reasons to Avoid DevOps
In this post, Premier DevOps Consultant Assaf Stone touches on 10 realities you must consider before implementing a DevOps transformation.
AZURE BASTION – SECURE ACCESS to AZURE VMS
Azure Bastion is a new fully platform-managed PaaS service. It provides secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to your virtual machines directly in the Azure portal over SSL.
B2C Identity Experience Framework – getting started
This sample configures an existing B2C tenant for use with Identity Experience Framework custom policies. It performs all tasks defined in the getting started document except creating a Facebook signing key required by some starter policies.
Machine Learning – Lessons from our POC
Using multiple algorithms and tuning the algorithms to find the optimum value for each parameter also improves the accuracy of the model. However, it is not necessary that higher accuracy models always give the accurate results, as sometimes, the improvement in model’s accuracy can be due to over-fitting too.
Customizing Azure DevOps with Extensions
Before embarking on building your own extension, I would endorse looking through the Marketplace for a solution, when I last looked there were over 1250 extensions available to add to your system.
Integrate Azure API Management with Okta
In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Hanna explains how to integrate Okta with Azure API Management for authentication.
Injecting content to every page on a site
I had to come up with a way to magically inject a script on every response, regardless of what technology was used to create the application or web page… believe it or not, this was not only possible but it is quick and simple!
Bias in Machine Learning
Machine learning is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that result in devices automatically learning and improving from experiences without being explicitly programmed. With so much success integrating machine learning into our everyday lives, the obvious next step is to integrate machine learning into even more systems.
Integrating Support cases into your DevOps process with the Azure Support API
So you have a fairly mature DevOps model in-place but you are missing the ability to integrate Azure Support issues into your processes. Well, that is no longer the case as we have released to the public our Azure Support Ticket REST API.
![[Service Fabric] Using the Azure Files Volume driver with multiple volumes](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2020/03/servicefab_fi.png)
[Service Fabric] Using the Azure Files Volume driver with multiple volumes
I was recently working with a customer who has an application running in a Windows container and that application outputs log files into different folders inside of the container. Their log extraction process was to manually remote desktop into the node, then go into the container to get the logs out.
InnerSource with Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps provides features that enable your organization and teams adopt modern software engineering practices, such as InnerSource using features like forks and pull requests. Thus, enabling and encouraging code sharing and reuse thereby reducing engineering costs, facilitating faster time to market, and additional feature enablement.
AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2
Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.
Enabling Remote Learning with Office 365 Education
In 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.
Implement App Insights Telemetry Processor in Azure Functions
Telemetry 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.
Mock your APIs in Azure API Management and speed up development
With 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.
Leverage ServicesHub for All of Your Training Needs!
ServicesHub, 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”.
Connecting A Durable Function to SharePoint Online
We 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.
Application Insights – Use case for TelemetryClient flush calls
Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.
Enabling remote workers with Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
This 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.
Modernize your legacy Windows desktop apps with ease using Xaml Islands
Xaml 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.
5 Reasons Why Engaging with Your End Users Improves Your Code
One 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.
Routing in Blazor Apps
Based 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.
Angular How-to: Add Application Insights to an Angular SPA
Application 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.
Push an ASP.NET Core API Container to Azure Container Registry Part 2 of 2
ASP.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.
Hosting and ASP.NET Core API in a Container Part 1 of 2 – Building the Container
ASP.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.
What Is Cloud Native, Exactly?
I 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.
Improving Angular CI Build Time Using Azure DevOps “Cache Task”
As 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.
Using Azure DevOps Artifacts as Upstream from another Organization
In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
From 0 to continuously delivered microservices applications – part 2
In 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.
Evolutionary Change to Cloud Computing
As 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.
GitHub with Azure DevOps
With 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.
Microsoft Teams for Developers – 5 Ways to fortify your dev team while working remotely
Working 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.
.NET Platforms Feature Comparison
There 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.
DevOps for low code Business Applications
The 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.
Sharing gRPC ProtoBuf contracts using a REST endpoint
One 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.
Create a Callout in SharePoint
This 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.
How do I get data from SQL CE to Azure DB?
In this post, Premier Consultant Tim Omta explains how to migrate from SQL CE to SQL Azure.
Azure DevOps Cross-Organization Reporting and Analysis using Power BI
In 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. Dashboards provide an easily digestible view of daily activities, sprint burndowns, and team velocity through clear visualizations, and Queries give the ability to define reports and charts for evaluation and analysis. However, when there is a need for cross-organization understanding there is currently no native a...
In-Memory OLTP Best Practices – Part 1
In 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.
Updating Cosmos DB Documents with Azure Logic Apps
When 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.
DevOps Dojo de Microsoft Services
Le 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.
A DevOps Dojo for Microsoft Enterprise Services
The DevOps Dojo: White Belt contains eight modules, each aligned to key DevOps concepts such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Security, Continuous Planning, and others.
DevOps Dojo de Microsoft Servicios
“DevOps Dojo: Cinta Blanca” contiene ocho módulos, cada uno alineado con conceptos clave de DevOps como integración continua, seguridad continua, planeación continua y otros.
Technical Debt – The Anti-DevOps Culture
Technical 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”
Dapr in a microservices architecture
Dapr is an event driven runtime that helps to build stateless and stateful microservice applications, with a diversity of languages and frameworks.
Developing SaaS Solutions for Government Customers
Are you already developing for, or want to extend your SaaS solutions to, the Microsoft Azure Government cloud? Read this article to learn more about considerations for your planning process.
From 0 to continuously delivered micro services applications – Part 1
In this first post in a 7-part series, Premier Consultant Ilias Jennane explains the fundamentals of containers and Docker.
Sprint Zero Considered Harmful!
Successfully 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.
Azure Key Vault and Transparent Data Encryption
Azure Key Vault is a tool for securely storing and accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, or certificates. A vault is a logical group of secrets.
How to Maximize the Value of Your Planning Session
Asking 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.
Get WebPart Information using REST
This 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.
Using B2C to support multi-tenant SaaS apps
AAD multi-tenancy is ideal for medium-to-large enterprises who own and manage their own identity infrastructure. This sample is for small enterprises, usually without their own identity infrastructure. It provides support for an application that needs to group it's users into discrete groups, each representing an application tenant.
The Soul of Innovation
What's the soul of innovation? It is energy. It is knowledge. It is having a purpose. It is a DevOps culture. A better question, however, is "who is the soul of innovation in your organization?"
Creating Words Cloud For Sentiment Analysis With Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics
In this post, App Dev Manager Fidelis Ekezue explores Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics.
Connect to SharePoint using NodeJS
Premier Field Engineer Gunjan Datta demonstrates how to retrieve data from SharePoint using NodeJS.
Unseen secrets – using KeyVault to protect OAuth2 token requests
This sample implements an Azure Function App, which uses Azure KeyVault to sign OAuth2 client assertions used to obtain JWT tokens from Azure AD. The private key used to sign the client assertion and thus authenticate the function to Azure AD is generated in the KeyVault and never leaves that service (it is not exportable).
PowerShell to upload IEF policies to multiple B2C tenants
Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon shares an example of a PowerShell script to upload a set of B2C IEF policies to one or more B2C tenants.
Adding Tags to New Resources with Azure PowerShell
Learn how to add tags to your PowerShell-scripted Azure resources and keep your systems categorized.
Centralized VM Certificate Deployment Across Multiple Regions with ARM Templates
Many systems still rely on certificate authentication. Those certificates need to be rotated and often managed from a central location. In this post, I will explain how to centralize your VM certificate deployment across multiple Azure Regions with ARM Templates and Key Vault.
Leverage QnA Maker Search within a Client Application
QnA 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.
Azure DevOps Security API demystified
In Azure DevOps, you can manage your security for a given team or group using the Permissions module. In this example, the API New Team has inherited and granted permissions. The “Allow permissions to view project level information” has been granted explicitly, while the permissions to delete, edit and manage projects has been inherited...
Start a SharePoint Workflow using REST
This 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.
Accessing Azure Resource Consumption Data Using .NET
I 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.
Using Azure DevOps Marketplace extensions with scrum projects
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager, Alexei Govorine shares three of his favorite marketplace extensions for scrum projects.
Flawless Demos using Git
Premier Consultant Andrew Charbonneau explains how he conducts flawless demos with help of Git.
Using Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics API Version 3 Preview for Sentiment Analysis
In 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.
Collecting and Analyzing Dumps with .Net Core on Linux
In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.
Understanding how to port your ASP.NET web apps to ASP.NET Core
There 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.
Integrating Blazor Components into existing Asp.Net Core MVC apps
In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to run Blazor Components in existing ASP.NET Core MVC apps.
Simplificando los pipelines de Azure DevOps con decoradores
Cuando se trata de DevOps, no faltan la cantidad de personalizaciones que las empresas necesitan. Desde entornos especializados hasta comprobaciones de calidad, cada empresa tiene su propia manera para determinar cómo es una implementación exitosa.
Azure API for FHIR
Azure 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.
Misty Robotics and Azure
Social 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.
Using BizTalk transform maps in Logic Apps
In this blog post, Sr. Consultant Larry Wall explains how to use BizTalk transform maps in Logic Apps.
Secure Access to Azure SQL Servers for Power BI
How 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.
Use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Boot Projects
In this post, Premier Consultant Pete Tian demonstrate how to use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Projects.
Why are Compiled Data Bindings Important in XAML
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.
Deploying React apps to Azure with Azure DevOps
In this post, Sr. Consultant Sidi Merzouk shows how to create a CI/CD pipeline for your React Apps with Azure DevOps Pipelines.
Hosting a Containerized Client Side Blazor Application On Azure
In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to containerize a client-side Blazor application for Azure deployment.
Introduction to Azure Go SDK – Part 1
In this 3-part series, Sr. Consultant Carlos A. Perez will showcase Azure SDKs for Go & gRPC. In Part 1, learn how to get started with gRPC and .NET Core.
Mindset & Culture at Microsoft
For a few days afterwards that moment kept replaying in my head making me think about the mindset and culture of a company like Microsoft. How being part of a community of learners who are encouraged to “stretch” one’s skills and experiences really does make a difference both personally and professionally.
Making the Transition: The key differences between university and working in the industry
Premier Developer Consultants, Ashley Shorter & Tamar Zamba, describe the experiences, challenges, and lessons of going from undergrad to Microsoft Consultant.
Tracking Santa with Azure
Learn how Azure PaaS powers NORAD’s Santa Tracker allowing for 51 million Page Views with an average response time of 100MS across the globe.
AKS Series – Monitoring Application(s) inside AKS with Prometheus and Azure Monitor
AKS 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.
Run Powerful Interactive Analytics Queries against Azure Service Fabric’s Internal Traces and Diagnostic Data
Collect 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.
DBA’s thoughts about monitoring SQL Server in Azure
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.
DACPAC always changes previously replicated tables on the target
Learn how to prevent the DACPAC from rebuilding all objects that once participated in transactional replication and have no changes in development.
Microsoft Teams – What’s in it for Developers, Part 2
Microsoft Teams continue to gain adoption in the Enterprise. See how Teams can help development organizations increase collaboration and streamline processes with integration with GitHub and Azure DevOps.
Testing – When is Enough, Enough?
Microsoft Testing Services is a global practice with almost twenty years of experience. Working with thousands of customers around the world, the services are delivered by a highly-skilled team of experts including best-in-class certified test consultants.
5 User Centered Development Tactics to Start Using Today!
With 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.
Introduction to Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, its licensing, and Premier Support
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) Protocol is the language communicated between a mobile device and server to enable synchronization of emails, calendar items, contact information, tasks, and push accurate and reliable data. Microsoft has a flexible support framework in place to help customers and partners adopt AES on Android and iOS.
Intro to GitHub Actions
GitHub 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.
Azure AI does that?
Whether 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.
DevOps Handbook review
The 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.
Demystifying the new .NET Core 3 Worker Service
.NET Core 3 introduced a new project template called a Worker Service. This template is designed to give you a starting point for cross-platform services. As an alternate use case, it sets up a very nice environment for general console applications perfect for containers and microservices.
Serverless Compute – Logic Apps, Functions and Event Grid
For this post, I want to introduce the serverless capabilities in Azure. With this, I’m hoping to spark the interest of developers, architects, and DevOps engineers to think differently. While not all problems can be solved with serverless, many can – and with that in mind, why not consider it?
Microsoft Security Code Analysis – a tool that seamlessly empowers customers to enable security controls in your CI/CD pipeline
We 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.
Rastreamento de projetos cross-team a nível de portfólio com Azure DevOps Boards
A inclusão das extensões Feature timeline and Epic Roadmap no processo de gerenciamento de portfólio está ajudando meus clientes a tornar a vida do PMO ainda mais fácil do que antes. A extensão Delivery Plans permite atualizações de portfólio colaborativas, constantes e automatizadas. Isso permitiu que todos evoluíssem no processo de desenvolv
Advanced Error Handling with Power Automate
Sr 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. In most cases, this is what you might want, however sometimes you need to handle an error yourself and take custom actions, such as ignoring it or apply a retry pattern. Continue reading on Adam’s Blog…
GitHub Learning Path
GitHub opens exciting possibilities for you and your customers. This article helps answer the question “Where do I start?” learning about Git and GitHub.
Simplifying Azure DevOps Pipelines with Decorators
In this post, Sr. App Dev Manager Bryan Soltis demonstrates how to use DevOps Pipeline Decorators to standardize complex pipeline requirements. When it comes to DevOps, there is no shortage of the amount of customizations companies need. From specialized environments to quality checks, every business has their own recipe for determining what a successful deployment looks like. Many of these customizations need to be applied across an organization, ensuring that every project pass the test before it gets rolled out. If you are dealing with 100’s of projects, this is no easy feat. Luckily, in Azure DevOps, ...
Outlook Email Automation with PowerShell
In 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, today’s world thrives on automation. Computers can perform painstaking, mundane tasks in a matter of seconds, leaving you the extra time to work on a multitude of more mentally intensive jobs. Whether you have an advanced technical degree or just use the computer for day-to-day tasks, it isn’t too hard to make the computer your personal assistant....
50/50 Tech Equity for All Women by 2025!
I had a chance to connect with women who had similar plights during their careers. I found it very fulfilling, to take the opportunity to mentor and share with some who were in situations that I faced professionally over 20 years ago alone.
Azure VM and Disk Throttling
Using Log Analytics to efficiently monitor Azure virtual machine disk throttling.
Creating and refining your automated testing strategy
We 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
Meetup RECAP – Automated Testing for Excel Workbooks
Check out the innovative ways to use Python with Excel from a recent community Meetup event in NYC.
You need to invest in developers
Investing 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.
Tracking Cross-team Projects Portfolio with Azure DevOps Boards
Feature Timeline and Epic Roadmap in portfolio management process has improve the PMO’s process. The Delivery Plans extension allows for collaborative, constant and automated portfolio updates. This enables everyone evolved in the software development process to better manage the cross-dependencies between Projects, Epics and Features.
How to Alert on Azure BLOB Access
In 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.
AI, ML & Data Science – Explained
Where 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.
The Buzz around InnerSource
InnerSource takes the lessons learned from developing open source software and applies them to the way companies develop software internally.
Go from a C# Developer’s Perspective
As 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.
A Survey of Kubernetes Features in Azure
Using Azure services like AKS, Azure Container Instances and Azure Dev Spaces makes setting up a cluster and testing your containers relatively simple.
.NET Conf 2019
.NET Conf 2019, a free, 3-day, virtual developer event
Workshop Spotlight: Modern Authentication and Authorization
Building 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.
Astuces pour réussir votre certification CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer)
Dans cet article, Nous vous proposons des astuces pour réussir votre certification de développeur Kubernetes (CKAD – Certified Kubernetes Application Developer).
Ordering Messages in Azure Service Bus
This post illustrates how we can force an ordering of messages processed by Azure Service Bus. The intent is to illustrate some of the existing and exciting features of Azure Service Bus.
Update My Blog Via Email with Azure Functions
In 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. One thing that I did a month ago was replace the static page that was my [speaking page][/speaking] and make it more dynamic. In this post, I will expand on my previous implementation by using Azure Functions with Email integration to update my Blog. Continue reading...
GitHub and Microsoft Services: Developer Support – elevate and accelerate
Pairing GitHub with Microsoft Services: Developer Support is a combination that can lead to an elevated software development lifecycle experience. And we know software development!
Azure Ultra Disk Storage is here
With 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.
Using a Custom Translator with Azure Cognitive Services
Translating 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?
Introduction to ML.NET with Permutation Feature Importance
ML.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.
gRPC + ASP.NET Core as a Migration Path for WCFs in .NET Core
The 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?
Prevent reopening work item once closed | Azure DevOps (with Video)
Learn how to adopt Azure DevOps Rules to control your DevOps processes such as locking down Work Items after they are closed.
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Exam Tips
In this post, we'll offer guidance on preparing for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam.
DevOps and Beyond Outcomes
Not only do high-velocity organizations get better at what they do, they get better at getting better at what they do. This scales so that no one can keep up with them. After all, most companies hire from the same pool of talent, they use the same software practices such as Agile/Scrum, they use the same tools, and so on.
Configure Azure App Service for 64-bit platform and Node.js
As 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.
DevOps and Safety
Beyond 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.
Accessibility at all stages: A Good-for-All SDLC approach
Accessibility 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.
DevOps and Mental Models
We need to regularly update our Mental Models but more importantly we need to find better means to update our Mental Models if we are serious about enabling a better culture which enables more innovation and happier individuals in our organization.
Creating a Ghost Blog on an Azure App Service
Have you ever wanted to run your own blogging website but not sure if you want to build your own site or purchase an existing service? I had the same question myself and when I was studying for an Azure certification, I came across a demo of using this Ghost platform and the Azure Container Registry (ACR).
DevOps and Complex Adaptive Systems
What is DevOps? This is a question that I find challenging to answer and the more I study the subject the more difficult it is to define the term. One way to think of DevOps is by applying the notion of Complex Adaptive Systems.
Versioning REST APIs in Azure Serverless
In 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.
Angular How-to: Page load times using Application Insights
Find 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.
Automation and Integration with Azure Logic Apps
Azure Logic Apps are pretty amazing. You can quickly create elaborate workflows, integrating with many of your favorite Microsoft applications and develop your own custom connectors for 3rd party systems and platforms.
Scrum Isn’t Always Perfect (and that’s okay)
Over the years, I have coached and researched dozens of scrum teams to adapt to “real world” scenarios. Some may call them anti-patterns or some may call them “not scrum”-- but that is okay too because sometimes we have to work with what we have and still find ways to be successful.
DevOps or Economies of Flow
The very notion of economies of scale arose during the early industrial age but unfortunately is still prevalent in many industries, including software development. However, that has changed with DevOps but it still isn’t obvious otherwise I would not come across customers that still work in this paradigm.
One Project To Rule Them All
Unfortunately, many enterprises have multiple organizations and projects in their portfolio and merging them into a single project can seem a daunting task. While there are tools out there that can help, there is no “Single Tool To Rule Them All”.
Deploying a Virtual Assistant on the cheap
The thing I was interested in recently was deploying to the smallest and least expensive dev/test instances of the various services in order to keep the cost down. Since this was just for demo purposes and I would be the only one talking to the bot, I didn’t need the capacity and scale of the default install.
Deoptimize Your Snapshots Now in Snapshot Debugger
This setting allows developers to configure the level of deoptimization suitable for their apps. To enable deoptimization, be sure to enable Snapshot Debugger call stacks and local variable support from the Application Insights configuration page.
Learn How to Ask the Right Questions!
if you want to change something, never immediately assume that current conditions are immutable. If you’ve never discussed the possibility to change, you cannot know whether others – your partners, customers, teammates, or managers – would resist, or the reverse – enthusiastically gush and support the change.
4 Ways to Integrate Development and Operations Efforts
How do you deal with the fact that the developers in your organization cannot or will not own the process of delivering into production? How do you deal with the fact that your operations engineers cannot or do not fully understand the software to which they have been given stewardship?
The Journey Begins – DevOps starts with culture!
At this point we were five plus years into a local transformation that was underappreciated and overlooked by the global IT organization. The frustration was high and the hope was waning. For me this became my motivation to start a journey to understand why some organization can adopt DevOps strategies successfully and other struggle.
Tribal Knowledge – The Anti-DevOps Culture
By removing or reducing tribal knowledge from projects and teams, organizations set themselves up for success in an ever-changing landscape (exponentially changing). In other words, you can add to your DevOps culture (or create one) simply by subtracting the bad habits and behaviors.
AI and the Art of What’s Possible
Application 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.
Setting up a cloud server to run UniFi Controller
In this post, we'll explore how to setup an Azure virtual machine to act as a UniFi controller in the cloud, enabling 24x7 guest access without the overhead of running a physical machine continuously in your home.
Getting started with Docker for Windows
In 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.
Easily create a low-cost WordPress blog on Azure
These directions apply if you want to create a personal blog which is hosted on someone else's domain, and that won’t get a lot of traffic, and you want to do this cheaply.
Choosing the OAuth2 grant flow
Premier 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. This blog summarizes the questions that the implementer of the OAuth2 client application needs to ask and how the answers lead to the selection of the a...
Understanding ‘Why’ you should take CompTIA’s Security+ Exam for DoD Programs
It 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.
Is the latest technology the key to your team’s success, or is there something else?
We 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.
Install IoT Edge on the Jetson TX2 running JetPack version 4.2
JetPack 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.
Azure AD Endpoint V1 vs V2
The objective of this post is to summarize in one single page, the main differences between Azure AD Endpoint V1 vs V2, with a focus on client libraries and supportability.
Migrating an Open, Object-Oriented Application Framework to Azure
I start with a high-level overview of the TMIP Open, Object-Oriented application framework and technology stack that was designed and implemented fifteen years ago and explore recommendations (Table 1) for migrating TMIP to Azure. The goal-- to support the DoD mission and for bring continuous value and future expansions to stakeholders.
![[Service Fabric] Why won’t Visual Studio connect to my cluster?](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2019/06/larry_fi-e1559663437404.png)
[Service Fabric] Why won’t Visual Studio connect to my cluster?
In 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.
DevOps and Your Definition of Done
DevOps, among other things, is about collaboration, and a shared responsibility for delivering features into production. Your Definition of Done should reflect this. Learn why and how you should explicitly define Done to improve collaboration and quality.
Adding User Optional and Mapped Claims in the Azure AD Authentication Token
When we are using Azure Active Directory, we need to add extra information related to the user in the token that we received once that we get an authenticated user in our app. By Default, in our token we only see some user’s information like preferred username, email, name, roles assigned to this user and the unique name.
Understanding Your Cloud Adoption Maturity Level
To be successful an enterprise must address people, process and technology when adopting the cloud. I often witness organizations migrating to Azure focus primarily on the cloud technologies and fail to assess their current maturity readiness.
Installing .NET Core 3.0 preview to work with Visual Studio Code
I 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.
Developing a Dockerized Asp.Net Core Application Using Visual Studio Code
Visual 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.
Azure DevOps: Build pipelines for Arduino microcontrollers
Azure DevOps applies to any language, any platform including Arduino. In this post, I will show you how to build Arduino microcontrollers using Azure DevOps Build pipeline and a custom build agent.
Making Sense of .NET 5
At the first day of Microsoft’s annual Build conference, Microsoft announced .NET 5 which will be released in November 2020. This led to some confusion in discussions with some of my colleagues and friends. What about .NET Core? Isn’t that the future? The road forward?
React Native for Windows Goes Mainstream
React Native for Windows adds support for Windows 10 SDK to React Native, which allows you to build apps for all Win-10 devices such as PCs, Tablets and Xbox using React.
Getting started with Azure Logic Apps
If you’ve ever struggled with automating cloud/on-premises workflows or wondered what of your workflows could be automated, Azure Logic Apps now makes it possible for development and IT teams to automate these workflows with little to no code.
How to fetch a user’s profile from Azure Active Directory using PowerShell
On my recent journey helping customers migrate from TFS to VSTS; one of the most common obstacle is verifying that users marked for active import to VSTS have matching AAD records. Thankfully there is a fairly streamlined way to do this using PowerShell and the Azure Graph API.
Migrating a repo from Bitbucket to Azure DevOps
Migrating from Bitbucket to Azure DevOps is a quick and easy process. Once your code is in DevOps, you’ll have access to all the powerful services Azure has to offer.
Have you considered Azure Reserved Instances?
We recently had the opportunity to work with a customer and help manage their Azure cost. This topic came up and it ended up resulting in significant saving by reducing the cost of resources they had already planned to deploy. Based on that interaction, we thought it would be useful to highlight this option in a blog post.
Dynamics 365 Implementation Pt. 3 – Postman
With 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.
Getting Started with Azure Blueprints
Azure Blueprints now makes it possible for development teams to rapidly build and stand up new environments with a set of built-in components -- such as networking -- to speed up development and delivery.
Understanding how Microsoft Azure keeps your data safe
When 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!
Dynamics 365 Implementation Pt. 2 – Data Migration Process
Throughout 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.
Quantum Computing: Learn Now and Prepare for the Future
Microsoft 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.
Blockchain: Let’s think this through again
The strategy / business operatives should define the problem space and leave it to the Solution Architect to evaluate and build the best solution. Any decent Solution Architect would apply Occam's Razor to any solution (s)he creates; the end solution would be as simple as could be (but not simpler).
Using Groups in Azure AD B2C
Accessing 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.
404 response code caused by App Services – AlwaysOn feature
In this post, Sr. Consultant Adel Ghabboun shows how to optimize Azure App Service Always against cold starts.
Hour of Code and Minecraft for All Ages
Learn how to organize and run your own successful Hour of Code learning events.
Enabling DevOps in A Hybrid Cloud Environment at DoD
Learn 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.
How Microsoft Tracks Santa
In this post, App Dev Manager Casey Kriutzfield shed some light on the NORAD Tracks Santa Azure architecture allowing for some impressive page view metrics. I’m Casey Kriutzfield. One of the leads for NORAD Tracks Santa. For the past several years, we’ve been a key partner in the NORAD Tracks Santa website. Along with development, we coordinate support and hosting as well. Naturally, a site like NORAD Tracks Santa is best hosted in the cloud, and there is no better cloud than Azure. For most of the year we run a static website, but come December 1st, we change over to the full site. Changing over isn’t all...
Conflicting Principles; DevOps VS ITIL.
On the surface DevOps and ITIL seem to be contradictory practices, with the former being more used in development work and the latter being more used for services/operations. However, if we drill down into their fundamentals you will find that DevOps cannot exist in its entirety without a framework such as ITIL.
Using Azure DevOps REST API with Node.js to retrieve repo permissions
In this post, we will show you how to retrieve Azure DevOps permissions using the REST APIs with NodeJS. You can use this as a starter to consume other Azure DevOps REST APIs as documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/?view=azure-devops-rest-5.0.
Legacy Apps
Many developers have had the opportunity to inherit code and applications. When that happens the first response is often to want to rewrite, refactor or kill it if it is using older or unsupported technologies. Oftentimes, we also have to consider modern design and improvement to existing technologies that have made the application obsolete.
Setting Up Permissions at the ListItem Level in SharePoint 2010 Using CSOM
This article will examine one approach to set up permissions at a ListItem level in SharePoint 2010 using the Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and ways to mitigate performance issues associated with ListItem management.
Insights to Application Awareness and Understanding
Application 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.
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Leveraging OWASP ZAP in the Release Pipeline
As part of an organization’s automated Release pipeline, it is important to include security scans and report on the results of these scans. One tool used in the industry is the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP).
Adding Authentication to Your App Easily with Azure AD
Secure 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.
Microsoft Security Risk Detection – What’s New
MSRD is a self-service, AI-powered Dynamic Application Security Testing service that optimizes your web development cycle to identify and remediate bugs and security risks as they’re introduced into the codebase – not after they are already in production.
Building a better DSC script
For those people that want to build a better DSC script, one that checks for most conditions and wants to keep their custom scripts from failing with no error handling, check out these recommendations.
Moving legacy ASP.NET apps with Windows authentication to Azure App Service (Part 1)
App Dev Manager Mike Lapierre explores authentication options when moving legacy ASP.NET apps to Azure App Services. When attempting to move legacy ASP.NET apps to Azure App Service, you might encounter a few challenges which are documented here. I want to cover specially the use Windows authentication which is not supported in Azure App Service. Let’s split this in two parts, first authentication and then authorization. Authentication The obvious solution is to use Azure AD which allows authentication on the Intranet without entering your password with technologies like Seamless SSO or ADFS. There are a...
Migrating a static web site using custom HTTP modules to Azure App Service
I was asked recently about migrating a local Internet Information Server (IIS) static web application to an Azure App Service. For this type of question For migrations to Azure, resources like the App Service Migration tool are usually a good place to start. In this case the App Service Migration tool reported issues...
Three most popular Git workflows
Coding has evolved from incubators to online hubs which allow for remote coding. The size of applications has become increasingly difficult for a single person to code. Experts in various coding areas, therefore, converge on the virtual platform in order to contribute to the more massive code repository.
Microsoft Build Kickoff 2019
Microsoft 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.
How To Update Visual Studio 2019 Asp.Net Core Angular Project
The 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.
Using Azure DevOps to Deploy Web Applications to Virtual Machines
While it’s worth mentioning that hosting web applications using Azure PaaS offerings or via containers would be the preferred route for a variety of reasons, VMs are still widely used in many organizations. With that scenario in mind, this post is geared to helping you get started with streamlining your release process. As a note, much of this process translates easily to using Azure PaaS offerings.
AKS Series– Using Azure Dev Spaces with Visual Studio Kubernetes Tooling
Azure 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.
Tips on Starting DevOps Projects
DevOps uses Agile principles and combines infrastructure, development, QA, and operations engineers together through the entire cycle of software development, deployment, and support, eliminating many of the silos between teams. Most importantly, DevOps improves communication and enables better collaboration, helping enterprises to bring products and innovation to market much more rapidly.
AKS Series – Use Azure Storage Option as Persistent Volumes in AKS
One 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.
Private CDN for hosting data on SharePoint for improving performance
When 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.
Azure DevOps Hands-On Labs
I love to learn about new technologies. You install the product, grab a few samples, pour over blogs & documentation and away you go. I have found over the years as systems have gotten more complex its harder to explore new products. Sure you can install them, VMs have even made that quick, you don’t even have to install. But to truly explore you really need the data. Even worse, a lot of the time the samples are just a small subset of the scenario and require a lot of work to go beyond the basics. But the Azure DevOps team has put together a great program with dive in, enter Azure DevOps Hands-On Labs.
Quantum Computing for Software Developers – Part I
The 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.
Angular How-to: Hide Logic from Users by Moving it out of the Browser and into Azure Functions
A 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.
Updating Git certificate bundles to use Department of Defense signed certificates
The most recent problem revolves around Git 4 Windows (Or any other Git client) and certificate revocation checking against Team Foundation Server (Or other source control) secured with a .mil URL, or any URL secured with a Department of Defense (DoD) signed certificate.
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 directio...
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.
Designing IoT Applications for Failure: Cloud Design Patterns that leverage the Retry Pattern
The 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.
Installing WindowsToGo on USB Drive for Mac
This article is written to show you how to run Windows on a Mac that doesn’t have enough local storage by working around issue using an external USB drive and Windows To Go product to create image.
The Cost of Bad UX Part 2: Improving the UI to Shrink Cost
This 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.
The Cost of Bad UX Part 1: Putting a price on look and feel
One 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.
Custom AI Models with Azure Machine Learning Studio and ML.NET
From 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.
PowerApps Design – Create a Digital Alarm Clock Display
In this post, we’ll look at how to use SVG images and some formulas to create a digital alarm clock style display in PowerApps. This is going to involve some image manipulation, so I’ll use one of my favorite free vector programs, Inkscape, to create SVG files that can be used in the clock display. I’ll also be using a free-for-commercial use digital clock font for this example (thanks to the author).
Bypassing authentication for the local Kubernetes Cluster Dashboard
It’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.
Preparing for AZ-300 and AZ-301 with Pluralsight courses
Microsoft and Pluralsight have partnered to give Azure learners access to 46 Pluralsight video courses. Anyone who redeems this benefit can use all Pluralsight features available to individual subscribers, including paths, Skill IQ, channels, and notes.
Investigating Production Issues with Azure Monitor and Snapshot Debugger
On this episode of the On.NET Show, ADM Isaac Levin talks about how we can better triage issues in Production environments using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Snapshot Debugger, SnapPoints and LogPoints.
How to link your MCP profile to a partner organization
Anyone 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.
Mixing Windows and Linux containers with Docker Compose
Running Linux containers on a Windows host has been available for awhile now. However, getting Windows and Linux containers to communicate without Docker Compose results in using the containers’ IP Addresses. This is not a good solution since container IP Addresses change often.
New Concept: Diversity Driven Development
Diversity Driven Development (DDD) is concept that I’ve envisioned for some time. DDD can enable you, your team and/or your organization to build software and services that provide solution beyond just the current customer demographic.
Planning the future for NoSQL Cassandra DB Applications on Azure
In 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. Apache Cassandra is a commonly used, high performance NoSQL database. Customers that currently maintain Cassandra on-premises may consider migration Cassandra DBs workloads to the cloud. This post explores Cassandra deployment options, as...
Getting Started with Windows 10 IoT Core & Raspberry Pi 3B+
In 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. Everything you need (to complete this article) You will need the HDMI cable to connect the Pi to a monitor for checking installation status. Likewise, having a USB keyboard and mouse for installation is suggested in case they’re needed for troubleshooting. Technically speaking, a lot of functionality can be accomplished through the browser or remote con...
Moving to the Cloud is NOT about the Cloud
One of the questions that I get asked very regularly by customers, colleagues, and friends is “Why do I need to move my … to the cloud?“ Almost every time this question comes up, the conversation very quickly gets into technical capabilities of the cloud, cost saving or the last service that this or that cloud vendor has released. These are all valid reasons, but that’s not what drives people, teams, or organizations.
Consider This When Planning your TFS to Azure DevOps Migration
Depending on what version of TFS you intend to migrate and what features you are using, there are a few things that in my opinion are “major” considerations because they have the potential of adding scope to your migration efforts. While you will find out about them as you read through the official migration guide, I believe there is value to knowing these things prior to embarking in such journey.
Angular How-to: Microsoft ADAL for Angular 6+ with Configurable Settings
Laurie Atkinson, Senior Consultant explains how to use the microsoft-adal-angular6 wrapper library to authenticate with Azure Active Directory in your Angular 6+ apps.
e-signature requirements in Azure DevOps service and Azure DevOps Server
The reason for this post is to help customers realize how to satisfy the CFR – Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, PART 11 ELECTRONIC RECORDS; ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES requirements with Team Foundation Server, Azure DevOps Service and Azure DevOps Server.
Exploring Blazor with Visual Studio 2019
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Keith Beller walks use through Blazor, a new experimental framework for WebAssembly. What is Blazor? After 22 years of dominance as “the” native language for client-side browser interaction, JavaScript is facing new competition from other popular languages such as C/C++, Go, PHP, C# and others thanks to the growing adoption of WebAssembly or Wasm. All four major browser engines Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge now support WebAssembly. In fact, according to caniuse.com as of March 1st 2019 80.62% of users globally are using web browsers that support WebAssembly. Blaz...
Remediation of old versions of Visual Studio Isolated Shell
With this little tidbit of information, we were able to write a powershell script that iterates through a given folder recursively and identifies executables that are dependent on VS Isolated Shell.
Gathering real-time Perfmon Counters in a cluster
Performance (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.
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.