Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
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DevOps for VMs with VSTS and Octopus Deploy
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Jafar Jaffery shares insight into how to deploy web applications to virtual machines using Visual Studio Team Services and Octopus Deploy. You can use Octopus Deploy in conjunction with VSTS to deploy both on-premises or in the cloud in a repeatable and reliable way. Problem Statement The Development team just finished work on its new feature and now needs that feature deployed to the Testing environment so that the Product team can validate the changes. Enter the Operations team. They are going to remote into the individual web servers and download the package w...
Microsoft Enhanced Application Support: Supporting Custom Applications
This post is provided by App Dev Manager Francis Lacroix who spotlights Microsoft Enhanced Application Support.Custom solutions provided by consultants can sometimes challenge the development groups inheriting them. Perhaps they do not have the skillset to support them and enhance them, or they do not have experience with the platforms the solution was built on. In some cases, they will look to Premier Support for Developer to ramp up on these technologies and provide guidance. When the solution is provided by Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), another option is available: Microsoft Enhanced Application Support...
Microsoft Disaster Response: Another great reason to work for Microsoft
This post is provided by App Dev Manager Rich Maines who shares his experience volunteering with Microsoft Services Disaster Response.“When a disaster occurs, you’ve entered a “new reality,” says Lewis Curtis, director of Microsoft Services Disaster Response. It won’t be enough to simply restore your systems and applications to where they were before – disasters change everything, irrevocably and permanently.” Catastrophic events like the San Jose Floods, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma & Maria, Mexico Earthquake, California Wildfires, Cape Town Water Crisis are recent examples that illustrate the need for r...
Automating Releases to Separate Azure Resource Groups using both TFS and VSTS
This post is written collaboratively by Premier Developer Consultants Ilias Jennane and Daisy Chaussee along with App Dev Manager Wyn Lewis-Bevan. Read on to learn how to build a solution in TFS, release it in VSTS, and automate the deployments to separate Azure Resource Groups. Business Case: One of our customers recently challenged us with a use case that is not very common. They wanted to keep using TFS 2015 for work item management, git source control, and build management. However, they also wanted to use VSTS for release management into Azure. In addition, their deployment process is quite advanced. They...
Enterprise Deployment of an Internal Load Balancer with an App Service Environment v2
App Dev Manager Mariusz Kolodziej kicks off this multi-part series covering the deployment of an Internal Load Balancer with an App Services Environment via ARM templates and PowerShell.Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is becoming the norm for deploying all resources (IaaS and PaaS) in the Cloud. This post is part 1 of 7 of a miniseries which will take us though the process of deploying an Internal Load Balancer (ILB) with an App Service Environment (ASE) v2, all via Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates and PowerShell. The miniseries will cover the following 7 topics:Read the full post and track this series o...
How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 4 – Azure IoT Hub
In the fourth post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about how to configure within the Azure IoT Hub. In the first part of this series, I described the problem I was having, my hypothesis as to the source of the issue, and the steps I would take to test my hypothesis. In the second post, I described the electronics that I built to start capturing environmental sensor data. The third post describes the code for the IoT sensor rig to send telemetry data to Azure IoT Hub. This post will address the configuration within...
How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 3 – ESP8266 Code
In the third post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about writing the code for the sensor rig to send telemetry data to Azure IoT Hub. In the first part of this series, I described the problem I was having, my hypothesis as to the source of the issue, and the steps I would take to test my hypothesis. In the second post, I described the electronics that I built to start capturing environmental sensor data. This post describes the next step needed to begin testing: writing the code for the IoT sensor rig to send telem...
How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 2 – Electronics
In the second post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about developing the IoT sensor rig. In the first part of this series, I described the problem I was having, my hypothesis as to the source of the issue, and the steps I would take to test my hypothesis. This post describes the first step needed to begin testing: developing the IoT sensor rig. The Sensor Rig The first step is to design and code the sensor rig. This rig has 4 important parts/circuits and a couple of non-essential LEDs. See the diagrams and story u...
Integrating Angular Unit Tests With Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Using Headless Chrome and Puppeteer
In the following post, Premier Developer Consultant Wael Kdouh expands on a previous post and demonstrates how you can run unit tests using headless Chrome and utilize Puppeteer to install Chrome on your CI server. In a previous post, I showed you how to Integrate Angular Unit Tests with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). Whereas it worked flawlessly it did have dependency on PhantomJS which is a headless browser. The only issue with PhantomJS is that it tends to have some random issues which makes it challenging to integrate within your CI server. Fortunately, Chrome added support for running in headless...