Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
Latest posts
Part 2 – Deploying Your Dockerized Angular Application to Azure Using VSTS
In part 2 of a series of posts, Premier Developer Consultant Wael Kdouh demonstrates how to eliminate daunting requirements and instead install Angular build tools and utilize Docker to more easily and efficiently deploy an application to Azure using VSTS. From Wael: In part 1 I demonstrated building a VSTS build pipeline which built an Angular Docker image and deployed it to an Azure Web App for Containers. Whereas it helped me achieve consistency across development and production environments, it required the build server to have all the necessary tools to build the application (Typescript, npm depend...
Deploying Linked ARM Templates with VSTS
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Najib Zarrari walks through how to deploy linked ARM templates with Visual Studio Team Services. When dealing with deploying a large number of components in Azure, a single ARM template might be challenging to manage and maintain. ARM linked templates allow you to make your deployment more modular making the templates easier to manage. When dealing with large deployments, it is highly recommended to consider breaking down your deployment into a main template and multiple linked templates representing different components of your deployment.Deploying ARM templates c...
Multi-Tenant Applications and Azure AD
Following up on a previous blog post, Premier Developer Consultant Marius Rochon describes recent changes and compares the use of Azure AD multi-tenant features with the custom features in B2C.Read Marius’s first post here.Since then, there have been some changes to the demo application regarding new modes and new features. In his follow-up post, Marius describes these changes in more detail, comparing the classic Azure AD multi-tenant features with supporting multi-tenancy using custom features in B2C. Learn more here.
DevOps and Leadership
In this post, App Dev Manager Ron Vincent explorers the role of leadership in an industry driven by DevOps.DevOps requires a different approach to leadership. In this article I'll explain where "management" came from and how we can change it for the age of rapid innovation.For decades now, the American corporation has been modeled after the concepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor who back in 1910 studied how workers did their work at a steel company. “In Taylor’s view, the task of factory management was to determine the best way for the worker to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to provide i...
Focus on your code, Let Microsoft Teams worry about the UI
In this post, App Dev Manager Kyle Kapphahn spotlights the conversational UI framework of Microsoft Teams to simplify UI development for enterprise apps.When I first began commercial software development in the mid-90's (yes, I know I'm dating myself), we used the classic 3-tier model: Presentation, Business Logic, and Data Layers. If you were lucky, each development had experts in each area. If you weren't lucky (like me) you were responsible for all tiers - front to back. I tended to love the BL and Data layers, with the Presentation layer being an afterthought. Most of my colleagues (myself included) always ha...
Opening a Premier Developer support request using Premier Online
This post walks through the process of setting up a new support case using Premier Online. Credits to App Dev Managers, Al Mata, Dave Harrison, Charles Ofori, Bharat Suneja, Joseph Flanigen, Sheldon Ledbetter and Bill Bevan. Opening a Premier developer support request on Premier Online Microsoft Premier Online (MPO) is an online portal exclusively available for Premier Support customers. It is one method to create Premier support requests - others include dialing into a Premier phone number (discussed below) and using the Azure Portal. Customers often ask what type of selections I should m...
Avoiding struct and readonly reference performance pitfalls with ErrorProne.NET
As you may know from my previous posts "The 'in'-modifier and the readonly structs in C#" and "Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#", structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in "readonly" contexts is very different. Structs are meant for high-performance scenarios and to use them efficiently you should know quite a bit about different hidden operations that the compiler emits to enforce struct immutability. Here is a short overview of the caveats you should remember: The same rules are applied wh...
Enterprise Integration made easy in Azure
In this post, App Dev Manager Deepa Chandramouli explores how Azure Logic Apps and API Management can help with Enterprise Integration scenarios.Being in the services role and helping customers in their digital transformation journey with Azure, this is a topic that comes up time and again. How do we talk to apps in Azure from our on-premises systems or vice versa. There are really some neat PaaS services in Azure that makes these integrations easy. The most popular ones which customers have been taking advantage of are Azure Logic Apps and API Management. Here is an overview of these Azure services at a high lev...
Three questions that could improve your Agile team
This post is contributed by App Dev Manager Justin Scott who asks three very important Agile questions.Agile has been adopted by many successful companies who value quality, incremental change on a more frequent basis compared to a team that uses a waterfall development methodology. Teams that embark on the journey of introducing Agile often hear about all the good that comes from Agile, but rarely are informed about all the challenges they will face putting Agile into place. Below are three questions to ask about your Agile team that might help take your team to the next level:Is your development team too siloed...