Developer Support
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Assigning Work Items to a Group in Visual Studio Team Services
In this post, Sr. Application Development Managers Mark Meadows and Everett Yang demonstrate how to extend VSTS Project Templates to allow Group assignments to Work Items.ISSUERecently a customer asked about whether they can assign work items to a group of users, instead of a single user. By default, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) allows a Work Item to be assigned to an individual user, not a group of users. In most cases, we would break Work Items down, so it can be assigned to single user. For this customer, however, they wanted the option to assign certain User Stories to a group and build queries and not...
Debugging Beyond Visual Studio – WinDbg
In this post, Sr. App Dev Managers Al Mata, Candice Lai, and Syed Mehdi gives a walkthrough of WinDbg. You’re likely a developer and have used a code editor to debug and analyze your application failures. Few developers know or understand the “old school” way of troubleshooting to uncover additional details; enter the WinDbg debugger. WinDbg is a general-purpose debugger for Windows operating system applications and code. It helps Developers find and resolve errors in their application, memory, system and drivers to name a few. This article introduces you to the WinDbg debugging concept and tool. Getti...
DevOps and Appification
In the following post, Premier Developer Consultant Ron Vincent explains how adopting DevOps principles can help organizations be more productive and aid in maintaining many apps.These days the typical enterprise organization has dozens and even hundreds of apps that it creates and maintains. In this article we’ll discuss how we can apply DevOps principles and practices to such a large portfolio of apps.The typical enterprise organization has a number of apps to aid employees, customers, suppliers, etc. There are apps for executives, middle management, and everyone else to do their every day jobs as shown here.Yo...
How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 1
Premier Developer Consultant, Steve St Jean, shares a personal story on how he used Azure IoT to figure out a solution to a problem that many of us face – high electric bills. In the series, Steve shares the process and code that he used to implement this solution.Telemetry data is an important component of any good DevOps process. Being able to observe and capture the data from a running system opens up a lot of opportunity to improve the system. I had a simple problem at home that telemetry could help me solve. With this in mind, I over-engineered a solution to the question, "Why is my office always so hot?".Th...
The “P” in “PM”
In the following post, Premier Developer Consultant Ilias Jennane sheds more light on the PM role and how it fits into the bigger picture of DevOps. In recent discussions with customers and colleagues about why large I.T. shops often struggle in adhering to Agile principles or becoming DevOps organizations, I couldn’t help but notice something extremely simple, however tremendously important. Large I.T. shops manage Projects, while software shops build Products. One would think that it is the same thing, but the gap starts to happen there. On one hand, you will have product owners (or product managers) and the ot...
Improved Privacy using Homomorphic Encryption
In the following post, Premier Developer Consultant Razi Rais gives more insight into how to use homomorphic encryption in the field of healthcare to improve privacy and secure data. Modern encryption schemes like homomorphic encryption (HE) provide higher privacy guarantees compared to the existing schemes. Basically, you don't need to reveal your data in plaintext to third parties (e.g. social media, insurance, healthcare providers, etc.). Instead, they can perform computation on your data which is encrypted. Even in active development stages, HE does provide many interesting opportunities to secure our data. I...
Utilizing VSTS for Wholistic Organization Management – Should It Be Done?
In this post, App Dev Manager Kristofer Olin explores limits and intentions of a tool like VSTS to go beyond traditional ALM scenarios. You've probably heard stories of people who utilize Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for non-Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) related purposes. For instance, I know someone that uses it to help manage his honey-do list and home projects. The most interesting use of VSTS I've encountered, though, was a desire to use it to track and maintain everything in the organization-- and I mean everything. This customer had justifications for doing so: some were in response t...
Running Django on Azure Web Apps for Containers with Docker
In this post, App Dev Manager Drew Lewis walks us through how to host a simple Python/Django application in Azure App Services. In this post I will walk you through a very simple approach to developing and hosting a simple Python/Django application in Azure App Service. For this demo we will target Azure Web Apps for Containers which gives us the flexibility to customize our application dependencies by wrapping those needed libraries in a Docker container. Currently, App Service on Linux doesn't support Python, but we will be able to containerize our web app and include any dependencies as needed. If you...
Exam Prep for 70-533, Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
In this post, App Dev Manager Omer Amin spotlights the skills measured by 70-533, Implementing Microsoft Infrastructure Solutions, and where to go to build your skills.I recently took the 70-533, Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam. Each Microsoft exam page has a Skills Measured section. This section clearly outlines the knowledge that will be measured on the exam. i.e. the exam questions are going to be about the following topics only. Continue reading on Omer’s blog.Premier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essen...