Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
Latest posts
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.
Walk through Running Traefik on Service Fabric Local Cluster
In order to help you get up and running quickly to test Træfik and Service Fabric, this post will walk you through how to set this up on your local development cluster. There is good documentation at Running Træfik on Azure Service Fabric, but with a local development cluster you can skip some steps, and there are one or two snags I can help you avoid.
Azure BOTs – getting extra access tokens
In this post, Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon show us how to obtain extra access tokens using OAuth2 Extension flow (on-behalf-of flow). The following describes an approach for getting access tokens to more than one resource, without re-displaying the sign in dialog (using the V2 Azure AD endpoint). In a nutshell, the procedure uses the existing authentication dialog to acquire one token and then the OAuth2 Extension flow (on-behalf-of flow) to acquire additional access tokens with the originally acquired token. Continue reading...
Classroom Labs with Azure Lab Services
With the Azure Lab Services, customers can quickly set up classroom labs for its employees to gain practical experience not only with the latest technologies, but also with their internal and external business applications. Classroom labs can also be used for hosting hackathons as it applies to any workload that needs on-demand temporary environments.
Preserving Date Modified on Files Deployed via Build/Release Pipelines
I was working on a DevOps scenario that involved automating the deployment of batch process files from one server to one or more other servers. To accomplish this, I created a build pipeline to collect certain files from the staging location and store them as Build Artifacts. I then created a release pipeline to ask for deployment approval and then deploy the build artifacts to servers in other environments.
Calculating server capacity and planning for future user growth
Do I need to add more servers if my user load grows by 10% each month for the next 12 months? That is a hard question to answer. Unless you have an Application Platform Management solution, it is hard to correlate function calls to CPU time and response times.
Exploring Feature Weights using R and Azure Machine Learning Studio
I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
Using Go Lang with Azure
In this world of digital transformation, languages like Go Lang have a major impact on project success as it helps increase developer and software efficiency. Leveraging languages like Go Lang and combining this into your Cloud Development Strategy can make a lot of sense. If you are interested in reading more about the features/benefits of Go Lang, this post is for you.
Running a .NET Core Web Application in Docker container using Docker Desktop for Windows
App Dev Managers Anand Shukla and Sash Kavalaparambil provide step by step instruction to run a .NET Core Web Application in Docker container using Docker Desktop for Windows.
Enterprise Application Modernization using Windows Containers
Enterprise organizations today have numerous simple CRUD based applications that call for modernization without necessarily needing to re-architect the legacy apps. If you have an existing .NET app that could use CI/CD but not necessarily any immediate rearchitecting efforts, this blog is for you.
Azure Lab services scheduling now Available
Azure Lab services is a quick and easy way to manage environments for your team in the cloud. It is versatile enough to set up development environments, testing and even classroom lab environments. The service handles all the infrastructure, user management, and now scheduling when the lab is available. The ability to stop a lab VM has been around for some time, but the ability to schedule when a VM starts, how long it remains up and then when it is to shut down recently became available.
IIS Remote Management for Docker Containers
When running IIS in a Windows Container, you configure it using PowerShell commands in your Dockerfile. While determining the correct PowerShell commands is not a difficult process it is inconvenient to verify the settings using the command line only. Sometimes, you just need a UI to quickly view and manage your IIS configuration.
Move or Clone TFS from one hardware to another in TFS 2017/2018
Prior to Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2017, moving or cloning of a TFS instance required manual preparation and configuration of existing instance’s backups. You can now configure your restored databases completely through the application tier. This blog walks through the new process to demonstrate how to restore and configure an instance of TFS to new hardware.
Why you should consider VS Code for your Kubernetes/Docker work – Part 2
In this follow up article, we will cover how it can help to deploy Container images stored into Azure Container Registry (ACR). We will also cover the kubectl explain integration which is helpful to understand the structure of YAML files used to describe Kubernetes API objects.
AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification Transition Study Guide
As Microsoft embraces the spirit of “lifelong learning”, expect updates to the suite of training resources and certification exams to ensure content reflects new technologies. Microsoft has published the exam guide for AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification Transition for those who have passed the 70-532 Azure Developer. Developers will get the “Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate” certification if they pass the new AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification.
Convert ASP.NET WebForms with Windows Authentication to use AAD
I work with a lot of enterprise customers that have sizable portfolios of Intranet web sites using Web Forms and Windows Integrated Authentication that they would like to move to Azure PaaS; however, we’ve found that a lot of documentation on these topics doesn’t extend back to Web Forms and instead targets .NET Core and MVC.
Using Azure CloudShell as a Dev Sandbox
Being able to create, develop, test, and deploy an application to Azure AND commit to source control with no tooling other than a browser is pretty powerful. This example was with .NET but there are tons of languages supported in CloudShell.
Handling Error AADSTS54005
On November 15, 2018 an update to Microsoft Azure Active Directory was released to bring AAD in line with the OAuth specification. This update prevents an authorization code from being used to obtain access tokens for multiple resources. The full release notes for this change can be found here.
AZ 203 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Study Guide
As a Microsoft employee who works with customers and a cloud enthusiast, I see it essential to be knowledgeable of how the cloud can bring the best value to the developer. Because of this, I am taking the AZ 203 exam, which is titled “Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure”. This exam was in beta for some time and was recently released proper in January 2019. Developers used to the Microsoft certification world will see this exam as a replacement for 70-532, which is the older iteration of Azure technology geared for developers. Passing this exam will reward developers with the “Microsoft Certified Azure Develo...
Durable Functions
While one thinks of event driven code, the requirements (operational) cab be broken into smaller functions, which is usually the code snippet executed as a response to a request. As the end user, one are not concerned about underlying infrastructure.
UX is not UI, but UI is definitely UX
When I first joined the Premier team here at Microsoft, a lot of the work I initially did for our customers was just that – advisory front-end design work. After many discussions about how I can provide value to our customers, I started to realize that even though words likes User Experience and User Centered Design are starting to be thrown out more and more in development, very few people have a full grasp of what exactly User Experience is.
![[Service Fabric] Stateful Reliable Collection Restore –The New Way](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2019/01/sf_restore_fi.png)
[Service Fabric] Stateful Reliable Collection Restore –The New Way
I wanted to provide a separate blog post because although the PowerShell code for performing a Restore isn’t too complex, the amount of information you need and how to find that information is critical to your success in the Restore operation.
![[Service Fabric] Stateful Reliable Collection Backup –The New Way](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2019/01/sf_backup_fi.png)
[Service Fabric] Stateful Reliable Collection Backup –The New Way
Recently, the Service Fabric team announced general availability of a new method of backup and restore of stateful reliable collections. What this blog post will provide, is a complete project sample on how to setup and perform a Backup (but not a Restore), with PowerShell, ARM template and code, to help you understand how to tie this all together. I’ll cover restore in a future post.
Want to be an ADM?
I’ve had the pleasure of working with customers who challenge me every day with questions that test my knowledge and experience, my ability to learn, my ability to research, and almost paramount, my ability to network amongst the vast expert resources in our consulting, support engineering, and product management teams.
Upload a file from an Azure Windows Server Core machine to Azure Blob storage
The title for this could be a lot longer like ‘how to upload a file using the Azure CLI to Azure storage on a Windows Server 2016 Core DataCenter’ because that’s what this blog post is about…but that’s a ridiculously long title.
Taking small steps into Azure (with Developer Support)
Premier Developer Application Development Managers and Consultants are all well versed in Azure; we are all certified. Our goal is to help your organization achieve more through your Azure usage: by helping you architect a solution, enabling and training your developers to develop for the cloud, and working through a proof of concept. We can be there every step of the way from planning through implementation.
Microsoft Teams: What’s in it for Developers?
Microsoft Teams presents a lot of opportunities for developers and development teams, from helping to improve Team collaboration and agility to providing a platform for deploying great functionality for users.
Demystifying Docker Containers Support on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016
Both my colleague Kendall Roden and myself were recently taking a deep dive into docker containers support on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. We knew that we could install “Docker for Windows” to add support for Docker, but as we dug deeper we found out that there is more to it than simply installing “Docker for Windows”.
Paired Programming & Visual Studio Live Share
My first experience matched many of experiences I remember mentioned in the books I read. At first, paired programming was extremely intimidating. I had to pair with an extremely seasoned developer thinking that I was about to be proved that I was not as smart as I thought I was – see Imposter Syndrome. Well, I learned many lessons from this developer by pairing with him. And in the end the developer learned quite a bit from me.
Set up IIS on Windows Virtual Machine
App Dev Manager Vijetha Marinagammanavar provides a walk-through of setting up IIS on a Windows Virtual machine hosted in Azure.
Cross (micro) services authentication with Azure B2C
Microservices is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, which implement business capabilities. The microservice architecture enables the continuous delivery/deployment of large, complex applications. It also enables an organization to evolve its technology stack.
Hosting Python packages in Azure DevOps
What I wanted to accomplish here was simply to create a redistributable Python package. Also show some of the practices on how to work with Python in a Windows environment, but I could not stop there. I went ahead and built a complete CI/CD pipeline for the package, showing how easy it is and how well Python projects integrate with Azure DevOps.
Alerts based on Analytics query using Custom log search
One feature was removed in Application Insights called Scheduled Analytics, and now it is replaced with Custom Log Search which allows us to create an Alerts based on data analytics queries.
Recommendations API is retired! Here is what you can do.
On February 15, 2018, “Recommendations API is no longer under active development” – as stated in the Recommendations API documentation. Our product team came up with an alternative new open-source solution called Recommendations Solution Template, which will let you host the recommendation engine within your Azure subscription. In this blog, will guide you through the steps of creating Recommendations engine, deploy and train your model. But first before doing that, let’s get to know the new additional components.
DevOps and Culture, part 2
This article is part 2 of DevOps and Culture. See part 1 here. In this entry I’ll discuss how we can think of culture in a systematic way and how we can change it.
DevOps and Culture, part 1
Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is a great introduction to how we think about DevOps and in this article, I’m going to unpack this statement so that we have a bit more context. This is the first part of multiple articles on culture as it relates to DevOps.
Moving your ASP.NET applications to the Microsoft Cloud
There are a few key scenarios that you will want to consider as you plan your migration strategy. Unless you have unlimited time, resources and money, it is likely that you will have to consider implementing one or more of the following options…
Resolve to be a “learn it all” with new Azure Certifications!
The path for earning the Azure Developer Associate certification has recently changed, based on AZ-200 and AZ-201 beta exam feedback and lessons learned. The new exam, AZ-203: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure, will be the only exam necessary. Candidates for the Azure Developer Associate certification will be tested on developing Azure infrastructures and platform as Service Compute Solutions, developing for Azure storage, implementing Azure security, connecting to and consuming Azure Services and third-party services, and monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing Azure solutions.
Devenez un « j’apprends tout » avec les nouvelles certifications Azure!
Le parcours pour obtenir la certification Azure Developer Associate a récemment changé, basé sur les commentaires et les leçons apprises des examens AZ-200 et AZ-201 en préversion. Le nouvel examen, AZ-203 : Solutions Microsoft Azure Developer, sera le seul examen nécessaire. Les candidats de la certification Azure Developer Associate seront évalués sur le développement de solutions basées sur les services d’infrastructure et de plateforme en tant que service Azure, le développement pour le stockage Azure, la mise en place de la sécurité Azure, la connectivité et la consommation des services Azure et tierces part...
¡Resuelve ser un "aprende todo" con las nuevas certificaciones de Azure!
La ruta para obtener la certificación de Desarrollador Asociado en Azure ha cambiado recientemente, según las opiniones recibidas de los exámenes beta de AZ-200 y AZ-201 y las lecciones aprendidas. El nuevo examen, AZ-203: Desarrollo de soluciones para Microsoft Azure, será el único examen necesario. Los candidatos para la certificación Desarrollador Asociado en Azure se probarán en el desarrollo de infraestructuras y plataformas en Azure como soluciones de servicios de computo, desarrollar para el almacenamiento en la nube, implementar seguridad en Azure, conectar y consumir los servicios de Azure y servicios de...
Tutorial: Run Spring Boot web service in Windows Docker container
Build a Boot web project, create a Dockerfile, build a Docker image, then run it in Docker.
Why you should consider VS Code for your Kubernetes/Docker work
VS Code can really be the platform of choice to benefit from the best features. Furthermore, its cross platform support allow users to have the same customer experience on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).
Build an interactive assistant using QnA Maker
I was recently engaged in a customer proof of concept scenario where they needed to turn their knowledgebase articles, FAQ’s and other company data into an interactive bot. For our scenario, we created a QnA Maker service that pulled HR information from a backend database so users can ask common questions in a conversational way instead of wasting time searching and scrolling through content.
Six Opinionated Tips to be a Better .NET Developer
I have been a developer for over 10 years, and I am always looking at new ways to be more productive. May I present you with 6 tips that I have started to adopt that I think have increased my developer skills 1000% (YMMV).
SonarQube Hosted On Azure App Service
This project simplifies the setup of a SonarQube server to one step. Simply click the Deploy to Azure link on the project homepage and follow the simple walkthrough to have resources deployed out and configured.
People First – The Frequently Overlooked Importance of Culture Change in DevOps Journeys
Why is it that some organizations, though they may invest great expense in tools, process development, and rigor, fail to obtain the transformation and benefits other organizations have so greatly experienced?
Remote Monitoring of IoT Devices Using Azure and HoloLens
This is going to be an IoT solution, which receives data from connected devices, stores the data and makes it available for consumption by a holographic or mobile application. So, you will first learn to set up the backend infrastructure--where you will have a device--which connects with a Cloud Gateway. Data received by the Cloud Gateway is stored within persistent storage, and finally, this data will be made available to a Holographic or Mobile app through Web APIs.
Interacting With Push Notifications Under Angular 7 Applications
Until recently Angular supported SwPush class which allowed PWA capable applications to subscribe and listen to push notifications from the Service Worker. Here is an example where I am subscribing to clicking on the notification card which will redirect the user to my blog. Also notice that you also have access to the action that triggered the click. So you can wire your code to react differently to different actions.
Building a Simple Contact Form with Azure Functions
I write about Azure Functions over and over again because they are the perfect solution for what I am trying to do, small little things that I don’t want to spin up a larger unnecessary app to do it. Then I had a thought, why not have an Azure Function that I could http post to and sent an email from there...
Preventing Single Sign On (SSO) Redirects From Opening a New Window Inside a Progressive Web Application (PWA)
I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.
How to Encrypt SQL communication on the wire
While on-premises, most applications did not take advantage of securing communications to the database on the wire just because of the inherent isolation advantages of having the application ONLY on the internal LAN. However, as more and more of these applications start moving to the cloud, the security of data over the wire is rightfully starting to gain increased importance.
Beyond “Lift-and-Shift”: Application Modernization with Microsoft Azure
The "lift-and-shift" approach with Azure IaaS can only deliver on small measure of the promise of agility and innovation in the Cloud when compared to modernized application (i.e., Cloud-optimized). Modernizing application with Azure PaaS, on the other hand, can deliver on the promise of agility and innovation to a great extent. It reduces the time required to manage the application and the time required to deploy a new release, and optimizes the speed to market.
Synchronizing Azure Cosmos DB Collections for Blazing Fast Queries
While Cosmos DB offloads many of the hard NoSQL scaling problems, shaping your data and choosing a logical partition key are left to you. The partition key choice is arguably the most important decision you’ll need to make – it cannot be changed and must be determined upon creation of a collection.
Angular How-to: Implement Feature Flags
In an agile development environment, there may be partially completed features or features with external dependencies that are not ready. Instead of relying on multiple code branches, instead you may opt for deploying code with a feature turned off. Later, that feature should be turned on via a configuration or database change. This post provides sample code that you can use to implement feature flags in your Angular app.
Completing the Redundancy Story of API Manager
In a previous post I discussed an approach to handling backend redundancy using Azure API Manager (APIM). In this post I want to discuss the various options for providing a high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to your services exposed by API Manager.
Azure Cosmos DB Pricing Overview
My customers have spent some time working with Azure Cosmos DB and had questions around pricing. I thought I would share a bit of what I have learned when it comes to pricing for Cosmos DB for this BLOG article.
Easy as Pi IoT on Windows 10 and Azure IoT Central!
Have you ever tried building an IoT solution on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi with an ARM processor? What languages did you have to use? What if that device had to send data to the cloud for dashboarding and alerting? How would you build the dashboard and manage alerts for authorized users?
Tracking Cross-team Projects in Azure DevOps Boards
If part of this transition requires that aspects from the legacy process be kept, it’s a great opportunity to demonstrate that through the use of agile process and agile tools, we can have an even better control of the value (beyond just software) that the development team is creating for the company.
Using ADAL.js with Angular4+
This is an update post to a previous article published in April 2017 explaining how to wrap ADAL.js with Angular2+. The previous article is no longer relevant given the changes to the Angular framework. This new post explains a reimplementation which uses the PathLocationStrategy and Angular features such as HttpInterceptor and InjectionToken.
Pragmatic TDD
I have been working on a small project in my free time in which I’m the only developer. When I started the project, I wanted to write the entire application in a test driven, test first, manner. I wrote my failing test, then made the test pass and as I saw opportunities to refactor, I took the time to reduce complexity, separate concerns and reorganize as needed. I was in a red-green-refactor rhythm and it was enjoyable to see the test count go up and my code coverage for tests at 100%… but then reality set in.
Understanding CIDR Notation when designing Azure Virtual Networks and Subnets
When creating a Virtual Network, specifying the address space is the most critical configuration. This is the IP range for the entire network that will be divided into subnets. This post is to help explain CIDR Notation for your subnet configuration.
Automating the creation of Azure Service Principals with PowerShell
Recently had to give a chalk talk on a Azure Service Bus (ASB). Creating and recreating the various topics and subscriptions is a bit of a pain since there are so many options and parameters to consider. The way I go about it is to create a utility that simply creates and destroys all the infrastructure I need for the chalk talk.
Microsoft’s Developer Blogs are Getting an Update
Update: The Premier Developer blog transition is now scheduled for early 2019 to ensure you have the best blog experience. In the coming days, we’ll be moving our developer blogs to a new platform with a modern, clean design and powerful features that will make it easy for you to discover and share great content. This week, you’ll see the Visual Studio, IoTDev, and Premier Developer blogs move to a new URL while additional developer blogs will transition over the coming weeks. You’ll continue to receive all the information and news from our teams, including access to all past posts. Your RSS feeds will contin...
Federation patterns using Azure AD
In this post, Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon considers scenarios where an application needs to be accessed by users from many sources of authentication (Office 365, owned and operated by Microsoft but whose use is managed separately by many independent organizations is an example of such a resource). It proposes a framework for determining an optimal solution for the application using Azure AD.
Microsoft Flow and PowerApps monitoring strategy
Both Flow and PowerApps are great tools that can be in the hands of business and power users to accelerate the building of automated workflows and business apps across on-premise and the cloud services. It’s easy to see how there could be many such Flows and Apps built, deployed and running within your tenant. It’s a best practice for the IT administrators to devise a monitoring strategy in place that could proactively keep a watch on these Flows, Apps and other related resources and alert and perform remediation actions as necessary.
Azure AD App Tracking with Logic Apps
Recently, I was asked by a customer with a very large internal Azure user base to help them find a way to keep track of Azure AD (AAD) application registrations in their directory. This customer has been on Azure for years, and the number of AAD application registrations has steadily grown during that time. There are so many applications now that it is hard for them to know which ones are still being used, and which are not. Furthermore, it’s common for application teams to create a secret key for their application and then forget that the key will eventually expire. How does the operations team know whom to cont...
Solving What’s Off About Monolithic Applications
It's all about the people. The resistance to change is human nature. Leaders and team members alike. Assessing the team is simple. If they can demonstrate an openness to changing how they do things you are on track. If team conversations consist of why things must continue to be done the way they are being done success will be a challenge. But leadership is the real key. Effective change is a collaborative process and management's primary team facing role is keeping the team within the agreed upon boundaries. But of equal importance is securing and managing executive sponsorship. The team is pushing hard against ...
The danger of TaskCompletionSource class
... when used with async/await. TaskCompletionSource<T> class is a very useful facility if you want to control the lifetime of a task manually. I share a canonical example when TaskCompletionSource is used for converting the event-based asynchronous code to the Task-based pattern.
Uncovering The Details Of Hosting a Node Application On Azure
I was recently working on a Node JS application and I decided that Azure was the right place for me to host my application as it made it extremely easy to deploy it to production. But shortly after deploying the application I started to have questions about some of the magic that Azure was doing to make everything “just work”. This post summarizes my journey in attempting to uncover some of the magic involved in hosting a Node application on Azure.
Cosmos DB Emulators can also run in the Cloud
Dev Consultant Julien Oudot demonstrates how to automate the testing of a data layer in ASP.NET Core WEB API with Cosmos DB.
DevOps and Waste
One of the great things we’ve learned from applying Lean to software development and operations is the notion of eliminating waste is our processes. In this article I’ll provide some background on why this is important and how to find and eliminate waste in your daily activities.
Client-Side Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) Developers Support Options
Support Escalation Engineer Dan Bagley and App Dev Manager David Huang break down the support options for client-side Exchange ActiveSync development.
DevOps and Business Strategy
When I engage with customers I often work with developers, business analysts, managers, Operations, etc. and the discussions are invariably about tools whether they are Microsoft’s or Open Source tools. These are great topics and open up conversations around many other topics. However, most folks aren’t really talking about the reason we are trying to use these tools. All too often the tools become the shiny objects in the room which divert us from even more important topics.
DevOps Stories – An Interview with Brian Blackman of Microsoft Premier
App Dev Manager Dave Harrison talks with Brian Blackman, a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Premier. As an Azure development and DevOps consultant, he works with Independent Software Vendors (ISV), Enterprises, and Partners where his specialty is DevOps. Brian’s focus is assisting customers in establishing a vision for DevOps, assessing where they currently stand, and then working with them to develop a roadmap to attain their vision. MCTP, MCSD-C++, CSM, CSP, SAFe Agilist.
Open Source Virtual Conference
Join us in the morning for a keynote featuring John Gossman and Gabe Monroy providing insights into how Microsoft has embraced Open Source both with its own technology and our commitment to the Open Source Community. Following the keynote, we will be focused on ensuring you are set up on Azure for the remainder of the day to be able to follow along with demos throughout the 14 sessions available.
Kanban Board Tools Extension for VSTS
The Kanban Tools extension for VSTS is now available on the marketplace. This is our first public release of the extension and includes the ability to copy to and from a team’s Kanban board.
Raw threads and async lambdas
Using async methods/lambdas where they are not expected causes unexpected problems. The typical example I discuss with people is TaskFactory.StartNew() because its an easy way to create Tasks and some people reach for that instead of Task.Run(), but I recently came across some code hitting the same problem while creating threads the traditional way.
Combining iterator blocks and async methods in C#
One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior. Programming languages usually designed to have "composable" features as well. You should be able to use multiple features together and the entire thing should just work. In C# you can compose different features together, and everything works. Unless it isn't. Recently I stumbled across a...
AI Discovery Days at a Microsoft Location Near You
Microsoft’s vision is to democratize AI and make it accessible and valuable to everyone. Join us to learn how to start building intelligence into your solutions with the Microsoft AI platform, including pre-trained AI services like Cognitive Services and Bot Framework, as well as deep learning tools like Azure Machine Learning.
Driving industry transformation with Azure
This monthly blog aggregates a series of the newest resources focused on how Azure can address common challenges and drive new opportunities in a variety of industries.
Azure Maps Simplified
Azure Maps are fascinating to me and also very useful in an ever increasing IoT world to track/transport goods, monitor traffic patterns for delivery routes and many other applications. What I want to display is the absolute minimum one would need to create their very first Azure Map.
Back-end API redundancy with Azure API Manager
App Dev Manager Mike Barker walks you through how to build out API redundancy using Azure API Manager. Azure API Manager (APIM) helps organizations publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services. API Manager provides a single point to present, manage, secure, and publish your APIs.
Continuous Integration, Deployment and Test Automation for Dynamics CRM
Through this series I will be able to share my journey on implementing CICD process for Dynamics CRM with process workflow, POC, and tools. I am sure this will assist developers and architects in having confidence in implementing a successful CICD process for CRM.
Part II – Kubernetes DevOps : Introduction to Helm
This is the second post in a multi-part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on K8s project together and thought to share out learnings. In the last post, you get to know the application that going to be deployed in the Kubernetes cluster. In this post, you will learn about the tool called “Helm”.
Social Media – Benefits as a developer
I was only using Social Media as a place to hang out, relax, and kill time with friends. Then I had an epiphany. I could use social media for personal development, to enrich and advance my career.
How to stop misbehaving programs
GFlags (or the Global Flags Editor) enables and disables advanced debugging and troubleshooting features in Windows. You may be familiar with Gflags if you have had to isolate heap corruption issues or spent time developing Windows drivers. It’s also pretty handy to block the start of an application through debugging if it won’t respond any other way.
Kubernetes DevOps I – Introduction to the Historic Events
This is the first post in a multi part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on K8s project together and thought to share out learnings.
Azure CLI Aliases Are Awesome!
App Dev Manager Isaac Levin spotlights extensibility in the Azure CLI allowing developers to do some pretty amazing things when it comes to mastering long and complex commands.
Digital Signatures and Certificate Expiration Dates
Why should you sign your code binaries and documents? Read this post to learn why, as Premier Developer Lizet Pena De Sola explains reasons and best practices.
Software-as-a-Service Part 1 (Identity-as-a-Service)
App Dev Manager, Keith Anderson explores aspects and patterns of building solutions under a Software-as-a-Service model.
The Importance of Limiting Your WIP
Senior Consultant, Assaf Stone follows up on his previous post – why it’s important to limit WIP (Work In Progress).
Managing VC++ legacy within your Enterprise
Senior App Dev Manager Sanket Bakshi shares some ideas on how to manage legacy VC++ within your Enterprise.
Accessing Certificates in Service Fabric Hosted Windows Containers
In this post, senior consultant Megan Meyer demonstrates how you can utilize SetupEntryPoint scripts to manage acquiring certificates and making them available to your Service Fabric hosted container. This blog covers an approach that allows greater control and flexibility at the time of service setup so that you can have runtime access to certificate files within your container.
DevOps Stories – Interview with John-Daniel Trask of Raygun
App Dev Manager Dave Harrison talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO of Raygun, about the adoption of DevOps. "Human beings are the center of the universe. But you wouldn’t know that by the way we’re treated by most of the software we write. Great engineers and great executives grasp that. They know that to humans, the interface is the system – everything else simply does not matter in the end. So they never let anything get in the way of improving that human, end user experience."
Late night Blockchain thoughts
The reason why I've decided to write a blog post about Blockchain is not because I want to add a(nother) quick-start or easy explanation of the technology into the internet archive… I’ve had the chance to study, work and learn from the field what this technology may offer (a lot of potential opportunities) but of course also when it would be better to invest in something different. So my goal is to give you some food for thought and to feed your curiosity sharing my honest feedback and thoughts.
Performance implications of default struct equality in C#
If you're familiar with C#, then you most likely heard that you should always override and for custom structs for performance reasons. To better understand the importance and the rationale behind this advice we're going to look at the default behavior to see why and where the performance hit comes from. Then we'll look at a performance bug that occurred in my project and at the end we'll discuss some tools that can help to avoid the issue altogether. How important the issue is? Not every potential performance issue affects an end-to-end time of your application. is not very efficient (*), but unless it is us...
What is your Agile?
In this post, Senior Application Manager, AJ Weaver talks about the many interpretations of Agile.First, let me start by saying that when I am talking about Scrum, I am not necessarily talking about Agile. All Scrum is Agile but not all Agile is Scrum. As you can see below, Scrum is just one cornerstone of Agile. The term is misused and abused across by pretty much all organizations, but I believe it is very important for organizations to clarify what they mean by “Agile”. I have heard many people define Agile over the past 20+ years of my software development life. Sometimes people like to define Agile as “not d...
WIP Your Product into Shape
In his latest post, Senior Consultant, Assaf Stone shares some useful suggestions on tracking Work In Progress (WIP) in VSTS.What is WIP?WIP simply means work in process (also sometimes, Work In Progress). This metric simply measures how many items (features, stories, backlog items, tasks) your team have started to develop, but have yet to complete. In other words, how many items are currently being developed. This simple metric is extremely important, and a useful number to track and control. In this post we will discuss the reasons for limiting your WIP, how to do so, and how to track your work in process using...
Angular How-to: Share Server-side Validation
Laurie Atkinson, Senior Consultant, avoid duplication of field-level validation by dynamically applying server-side validation rules on Angular controls. Validation attributes are simple to apply to an Angular control within an HTML template, but that validation logic must be duplicated on the server. Instead, you can build an Angular validation service that parses server-generated rules and dynamically applies those rules using Reactive Forms. Settle on a schema that your API will provide Your server-side API will need to return validation rules in some format that can be consumed by the Angular applica...
How to fetch a user’s profile from Azure Active Directory using PowerShell
In this post, App Dev Manager Chev Bryan demonstrates how to fetch a user’s profile from AAD using PowerShell.On my recent journeys 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.Continue on Chev’s blogPremier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essential services to help teams optimize development lifecycles and improve software quality.&...
DevOps Stories –Jon Cwiak, Humana
App Dev Manager Dave Harrison talks with Jon Cwiak, Enterprise Cloud Platform Architect at Humana, about the adoption of DevOps.The following content is shared from an interview with Jon Cwiak, Enterprise Cloud Platform Architect at Humana. What we loved about talking with Jon was his candor – he’s very honest and upfront that the story of Humana’s adoption of DevOps has not always been smooth, and the struggles and challenges they’re facing. Along the way we learned some eye-opening insights:Read the full post on Dave’s blogPremier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support c...
SQL Server Objects as Software Artifacts
This post is provided by Premier Field Engineer JJ Jacob who takes a look at the benefits of SQL Server Objects as software artifacts.A recent customer engagement revealed several pain-points. One of them is the issue of not being able to pinpoint the exact database schema the development team delivered to the production team. The issue is about pointing to the one version of truth with regard to SQL deliveries into production.What compounds this issue is that software delivery is made through updates to a file share, which is prone to the following risks:We started thinking as to what technology could addr...
Legacy monolithic application – not a nightmare anymore!
This post is provided by App Dev Manager Srividya Annapantula who explores how emerging technical trends are changing the way we approach monolithic application.Dealing with a legacy monolithic mission critical application with millions of lines of code is a nightmare. This is especially true if you are an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) with an application installed in various client environments, dealing with different hardware, and a configuration drifting from recommended settings you may not control. If you cannot mandate a specific version, you probably end up supporting multiple versions of t...
Fast Start: Infrastructure as Code Using Azure DevTestLabs
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Derrick Cawthon teaches you how to get started with Infrastructure as Code quickly and easily using Azure DevTestLabs and VSTS. He shows how simple it is to use these two technologies to be able to deploy on-demand.A lot of folks understand that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a great idea and an advanced concept of DevOps. What a lot of folks don’t realize though when they begin their journey is that there are numerous tools and different ways to start.Using Microsoft tools, one of the easiest ways to get started with IaC is to take advantage of Azure’s DevTestLabs and ...
Setting up a Spectator View Rig for the HoloLens
This post is provided by App Dev Manager Richard Newell who shares his experience building a spectator view rig for HoloLens. We have been developing holographic apps for several clients and needed a way to allow participants to see what I was viewing using my HoloLens. Microsoft created a hack a few years ago and created a spectators view, the problem is that it covers different types of hardware and multiple setups. The other roadblock being that it was not maintained by the community. What I am doing is to simply the process and to have you up and running with your own spectator view in a couple of days.He...
Remote debugging Azure App Services
This post is provided by App Dev Managers Chris Westbrook and Susan Leighton who walk us through remote debugging a web application deployed as an Azure App Service. In this post, we're going to look at debugging web apps deployed to an Azure App Service. Customers are sometimes apprehensive about using cloud PaaS services, based upon their prior experience working with on-premises IIS or IIS in IaaS. They are concerned about losing control and visibility or insight into the running of their site and feel this may lead to their inability to properly support the web site. They worry they will have to revert...
.NET Core 2.1 Update strategy
This post is provided by App Dev Manager Anant Dimri who shares some helpful Q/A around .NET Core patching strategy.We know that we can create two types of deployments for .NET Core applications:In a package, you can have .NET core runtime dlls as well as your or 3rd party dlls that you have referenced. When planning for a patching strategy for your .NET core apps, there are certain nuances and questions that come up.Question: When you publish ASP.NET Core web application that use CodeGen applications, it creates a runtimes folder. Can you help me understand what causes the runtimes directory to be created?Answer...
Angular How-to: Simplify Components with TypeScript Inheritance
Laurie Atkinson, Senior Consultant, By moving shared functionality to a base component and assigning dependencies inside the body of the constructor, you can simplify child components.If your Angular components contain identical or similar functionality and you find yourself copying and pasting that code, it makes sense to implement some class inheritance, which is available with TypeScript. And, you can simplify the child components even further by removing the dependencies from the parent constructor arguments and manually assigning them inside the constructor.Create the base componentIn this example, we have 2...
TFS 2018–XAML is back?!
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Derrick Cawthon weighs in on one of the latest announcements that TFS 2018 will include XAML builds. Starting in TFS 2017 it was announced that XAML builds were being deprecated. No big surprise to anyone paying attention as they are an older build system which had to go at some point. However this was a HUGE blocker for alot of customers who want to upgrade but don’t/can’t invest the time to switch hundreds of build definitions from XAML to Task based. Now (due to customer feedback) it’s been decided to deprecate XAML builds but leave the functionality in there. I think...
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...
Upcoming DevOps and Tech Conferences
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 ...
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...
Cloud Simplified: A practical webcast to demystify Azure features
This post is provided by Ryan Berry, a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) at Microsoft. In many of our strategic accounts, CSAs play a key role in the success of customers making a transition to the cloud and work closely with your Microsoft account team and App Dev Manager.The cloud is becoming increasingly important to business-critical workloads our customers run as evidenced by Azure’s explosive growth. Add to this analysts predicting continued growth over $200 billion through 2020 and it’s clear the market is speaking on the importance of cloud computing. Computing in the cloud is different when you’re not...
Running .NET Core 2.0 applications in a Linux Service Fabric Cluster on Azure
In this post, Senior App. Dev. Managers Guru Satish Piduru and Mahendar Madhavaram explain how to deploy .NET Core 2.0 applications to a Linux Service Fabric Cluster.The support for running .NET Core 2.0 applications in Service Fabric Cluster (SFC) environment on Linux is in preview mode today and general availability in the coming months. Today, stateless Service Fabric applications are supported in .NET Core 2.0 without any issues. If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 to develop Service Fabric applications, you can publish the applications directly to Azure SFC running on Windows but if you want to pub...
Spotlight on Industry Experiences
This post is provided by Marty Donovan, Senior Program Manager for Industry Experiences. The Industry Experiences team (as part of Scott Guthrie’s organization) delivers industry technical documentation and experiences to customers including use cases, solutions guides and hands-on architectural design reviews. Our goal is to help customers accelerate their journey to the cloud with clear and actionable guidance. Today we have seasoned experts and architects across retail, banking, insurance, health, and manufacturing and we expect to grow with further industries in the coming year. Read the following artic...
Using AI and Bots as an underpinning for modern UI
In this post, Consultant/App. Dev. Manager Timothy Baillis explains how AI and Bots can improve modern UI designs.It has been said that every great developer is inherently lazy- or at least inspired by boring or repetitive tasks. The idea that you can code a program to automate a task or overcome an obstacle is a powerful incentive to create. In the past, developers could rely on device and services to remain more constant or at least be easily updatable to continue to function. Now with the proliferation of services, devices, and applications it has become increasingly difficult to code once. There has been a gr...
Did you plan for accidental deletion of your critical data in Azure?
In his post, Principal App. Dev. Manager Rick Caudle lays out a strategy for dealing with business-critical data in Azure.So, you moved to the Cloud and you fully understand Azure Storage and all the greatness that comes with the various replication options i.e. Locally redundant storage (LRS), Zone-redundant storage (ZRS), Geo-redundant storage (GRS). All these replication features are designed for transient hardware failures, network or power outages, massive natural disasters, and so on. But, none of these are intended to help with mass or accidental delete operations. Continue reading more on Rick’s blog post...
Visualize Code with Visual Studio
In this post, App Dev Manager Ed Tovsen spotlight the features and benefits of Code Maps in Visual Studio.Systems architects have long used modeling to design the structure, behavior, and interaction of systems within an organization. Modeling helps to ensure that requirements are clearly defined between users and IT. Models are created with varying levels of detail throughout the application lifecycle and used as part of the development process. Typically, modeling tools assist architects in the initial stages of application conceptualize and construction. However, there are also visualization tools to comprehen...
My Volunteer Experience with TEALS
In this post, App Dev Manager Ruth Ferland shares her experience volunteering through TEALS to promote Computer Science and the education of kids in her community.For School Year 2017-18, I decided to volunteer for TEALS (https://www.tealsk12.org/). TEALS stands for Technology Education and Literacy in Schools. It’s a non-profit organization in the United States that recruit, train and deploy technical volunteers to co-teach Computer Science in high schools.The Recruiting ProcessTEALS starts recruiting for volunteers for the next school year in the prior spring season, so that there is a full list by the summer f...
Securing Azure Storage for the Software Architect
In this post, App Dev Manager Keith Anderson explores how Azure Key Vault can be used to secure access to Azure storage operations. In the beginning... As I began to learn about Microsoft’s cloud a couple of years ago, I began to realize that some services had been around since its inception and were fundamental to the way things worked, with other services built on top. Azure Storage is certainly one of those fundamental services that can be used as building blocks in your own applications. To any organization leveraging Azure Storage, it seems to me that, like with any tool or construction material, you...
Getting Started with DevOps and Continuous Delivery of Value
In this post, Application Development Manager Wesam Darwish highlights some important information to help customers learn and adopt DevOps. DevOps: a buzz word, or an exciting transformation journey? As organizations strive to deliver value to their end users faster, improve quality and availability, optimize costs, and deliver innovation with digital-era velocity; they face numerous challenges. These challenges prevent flexible and agile creation of business value. With multiple industry definitions of DevOps, the definition we adopt at Microsoft is the following: DevOps is the union of people, pro...
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...
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...
Azure Storage Encryption and Azure Disk Encryption – Demystified?
In this post, Sr. App Dev Manager Mark Pazicni lays out the capabilities of Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) and Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) to help clarify their applications. With Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE), your data is just encrypted. New and existing Azure Storage Account are now 256-bit AES encrypted to storage data encrypted while it is at rest. Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) encrypts both your OS and Data disks for IaaS VMs. Azure Disk Encryption is supported on the following Linux server distributions and versions: ...
Docker Blog Series Part 7– Deploy Azure Web App On Containers
In the following post, Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo shows how to deploy a Container to Azure Web Apps directly from Azure Container Registry. Container services are encapsulated, individually deployable components that run as isolated instances on the same kernel to take advantage of virtualization that an operating system provides. Thus, each application and its runtime, dependencies, and system libraries run inside a container with full, private access to the container's own isolated view of operating system constructs. Azure has various services to orchestrate containers like Azure Servi...
Application Insights in Disconnection Mode
In this post, Premier Developer Consultant Adel Ghabboun gives insight on connectivity issues in Azure and how they may effect Application Insights. He gives details about a special disconnection mode that App Insights can run on when such issues arise. Wondering what happens to Application Insights when applications lose connectivity with Azure? Is telemetry still going to be captured and sent to Application Insights? Will you lose any important performance data about your application? The short answer is NO! In many cases, your app might lose connectivity to Microsoft Azure. It could have a firewall that pr...
Blockchain in the Enterprise
In this post, Sr. Consultants Farah Deendar and Chike Okor introduce blockchain concepts and enterprise adoption constraints. So, what is Blockchain exactly? Blockchain, also called distributed ledger technology (DLT), is a cryptographically safe, secure, decentralized and immutable database. Blockchain is used to create a digital transaction ledger that is shared among a distributed network of computers. Blockchain’s foundation is based on cryptography which provides powerful properties of being decenftralized and immutable with the use of Cryptographic Hash Functions, Public Key Cryptography and Digital...
Why Developers Should Install WSL Today
In this post, App Dev Managers Matt Hyon and August Banks spotlights the developer benefits of WSL. You've just finished installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on your Windows 10 computer and feel pleased to see your favorite Linux distro icon pinned to your taskbar. You click to open a shell session and think, "OK, what can I do with it?". It's a common thought for those kicking the tires more out of curiosity than with a specific purpose in mind, especially since there are many tools available natively on Windows to accomplish similar tasks, PuTTY for instance. So, we reached out to the extended WSL ...
Setting up .NET Core Configuration Providers
ASP Core uses the convenient Provider Pattern to load configuration key/value pairs from various sources and expose those to you as a single Configuration object. This allows you to grab a configuration key like ConnectionString with one line of code regardless of where it was sourced from. However, the configuration API is not available by default in .NET Core Console applications.
Azure Load Balancing Solutions: A guide to help you choose the correct option
In this post, Sr. App Dev Manager Fidelis Ekezue explain Azure Load Balancing options and highlight considerations for choosing a solution.Azure Load Balancing Solutions: When to choose which one?Microsoft Azure provides customers with many ways to load balance traffic requests to their environments. Customers have the options to choose Traffic Manager, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Application Gateway or the combination of all three in their Azure solutions. With the rate of web traffic increasing at a faster rate, no distributed solution is complete without the use of a load balancer to direct traffic and distribu...
Blockchain in a nutshell
In this post, Sr. App Dev Managers Bernard Apolinario and Ajay Tanikella gives a thorough explanation of Blockchain concepts.What is Blockchain?Blockchain is a Secured, Shared, Distributed ledger. It’s a concept with the following key aspects: Reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/accelerating-the-adoption-of-enterprise-blockchain/ Benefits of Blockchain Blockchain DiagramDifferent BlockchainsThere are 3 different blockchains. Blockchain Consensus ProtocolsSome of popular Blockchain consensus algorithms are listed below. VersionsEnterprise WorldBlockchain is disruptive technology that will impact seve...
Is Your Development Staff Ready for Artificial Intelligence?
In this post, Principal Consultant/ADM Larry Duff discuss some ethical challenges in Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been a dream of computer scientists for many years. I remember my early days of programming I had a Commodore Pet. I was excited that I had a book of programs, I typed them in and saved to my tape drive. One of those programs was ELIZA. I could type in questions and "she" would answer me, I had my own Hal 9000! If I understood the code I typed in (I was only 10) I would have seen it was a rudimentary natural language processor with canned responses. It was just a cheap knock of...