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Proactively Plan for your Critical Event in Azure with Enhanced Support and Engineering Services
In this post, Principal Consultant Jon Guerin lays out the benefits of Azure Event Management (AEM) and how to get started with the program.Deploying an application to Azure in support of a high-profile business event can have many advantages. But failing to assess up front potential gaps that could negatively affect performance and availability during the event and can result in an undesirable impact to the company’s topline. Consider having an elevated support experience from Microsoft before, during and after the event orchestrated by your Application Development Manager.Microsoft Unified and Premier customers...
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Container? Why not App Services?
In this post, Senior Premier Developer Consultant Casey Kriutzfield gives a walkthrough of deploying Linux Containers in Azure App Services.Containers have been popular lately, and Microsoft Azure has several products that are ready and able to serve your containers. Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Container Instances, and Service Fabric are all great places to run enterprise containers and many organizations are spinning those services up. There is another place to run your containers, and it can be forgotten among the popular ones I mentioned.A standard App Service.Specifically, the Web App for Containers. With...
Sharing Deployment Groups Across Team Projects in VSTS
Premier Developer Consultant Derrick Cawthon walks through how to share deployment groups across team projects in VSTS, so you can take full advantage of your infrastructure and maximize investment in cloud services.One of the many recent enhancements to VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) is the adding of Deployment Groups back in 2017. However ever since they were added the next obvious question was: How do I share these across my Team Projects (similar to how Agents work across Team Projects). This scenario is useful in order to allow organizations to take full advantage of their infrastructure and maximize the...
Monitoring Python Applications with Azure App Insights
In this blog post, Premier Developer Consultant Najib Zarrari walks through how to use Azure Application Insights to monitor web applications written in Python using the Flask framework.Read Najib’s blog post here to learn how to set up Application Insights, download and instrument a Python web application, create custom events and metrics in Azure, and report exceptions.
Dissecting new generic constraints in C# 7.3
During the last Build conference, Microsoft has announced the next version of Visual Studio with C# 7.3 support. This is yet another minor language update with some quite interesting features. The main change was related to generics, starting from C# 7.3 there 3 more constraints: , and . The constraint The constraint on generic type enforces the type to be an 'unmanaged' struct that does not recursively contain reference type fields. The concept of 'unmanaged types' existed in the C# language for a long time and you can find this term in the C# language specification and in the official documentation, but n...
Safe On-Premises Releases Using VSTS
Read on to learn how Premier Developer Consultant Ilias Jennane addresses the idea of safe releases and incremental feature rollout for on-premises releases using Visual Studio Team Services.I have recently interacted with many customers that were clearly under the impression that they should only consider DevOps practices if they are doing Cloud development. So, I decided to break this myth. The concept that I want to address in this blog post is the idea of Safe releases and incremental feature rollout. Read the blog post here.
Create Your First CI Pipeline in 10 Minutes or Less
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Derrick Cawthon shares how to quickly create a continuous integration pipeline in VSTS, so teams can start pursuing their DevOps journeys.During your DevOps journey typically the first item you will want to do (after establishing a good process for the team) is setup a Continuous Integration (CI) build. What does this mean in practical terms? Basically TFS/VSTS has the built-in capability of running a build anytime code changes in a certain repository (or repositories). This is a great practice to institute as it helps minimize the possibility of having “broken” code in ...
Continuous Delivery – Is it right for you?
This post is provided by App Dev Manager John Tran who explores the question: Is continuous delivery right for you?Coming from the operations world, I can't count the number of times someone has come to me asking for a production deployment on a Friday afternoon. This would always give me chills, thinking of all the late nights that I've been up fixing production issues, thinking of all the news articles about someone making a change over the long weekend and causing a nationwide outage, dreading the day after when I had to explain what went wrong…Taking a step back and looking at the situation from the business ...