Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
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Git in Education
In this post, Premier Developer consultant Brian Blackman introduces one of our training offerings – the Microsoft Git Solutions workshop.With Premier Support for Developers, our customers have access to many resources including education. Case in point is our Microsoft Git Solutions workshop. This educational opportunity is a two-day instructor-led training course that provides participants with the fundamental knowledge that is required to use Git. Participants will learn to use Git with Visual Studio for the client side and using Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Team Services, and other 3rd party h...
Using VSTS Service Hooks in Release Management to add resource cleanup resilience
In this post, Principal Consultant/App Dev Manager Lou Sawyer describes how to integrate webhooks and runbooks to cleanup failed Azure deployments. Release Management capabilities in Visual Studio Team Service are fantastic and offers extensibility points to make everyone's life easier. In this post, we'll be discussing the Service Hooks feature along with a potential use case integrating with a Runbook. As detailed in Integrate with service hooks, Service Hooks allow you to perform tasks in other services in response to events in VSTS. This capability can be used to start a runbook from a webhook (runb...
Risk: You’re Managing it Wrong!
The following post about managing risks in modern software development is from Premier Developer consultant, Assaf Stone.No offense, but despite your best intentions, you might not be handling risk properly. In this day and age, everything is software-dependent; even if you do not consider yourself a “software-firm” per-se, even if you are just running a small development team that develops in-house software, your business still depends on said software to run smoothly, and any outages cost money. The bigger the problem, the greater the cost. If you, like many other modern software-based organizations, try to red...
Enabling ALM Tooling in the Cloud for PubSec Customers
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Doug Owens explores cloud hosted TFS options for government organizations.In sharing notes with peers within Microsoft, it becomes clear that many of our PubSec customers can benefit from improved Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and DevOps practices. The world-class features, low barriers to entry, scalability, reliability, and ease of management offered by Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS) would seem made-to-order for PubSec entities looking for an on-ramp to the modern ALM/DevOps world. However, VSTS currently cannot be used by many of these customers (ex....
Docker Blog Series Part 5 – Understanding new container management features in Service Fabric
In the latest post in his Docker series, Premier Developer consultant Monu Bambroo talks about some of the new features in Service Fabric regarding container management. Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Service Fabric also addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud native applications. It is also an orchestrator of services across a cluster of machines and it is continuing to invest heavily in container orchestration and management. In this blog post, we will chec...
Walk-through of using SSH to connect Azure VM Jump Servers
In this post, Premier Developer consultant Kurt Schenk walks us through setting up an SSH connection to Azure using a jumpbox. Using SSH to access resources is becoming increasingly common for Windows users. Some typical scenarios are connecting to Linux VMs from Windows development computers; another common one is using SSH to connect to VMs in Azure through a jumpbox. These VMs behind the jumpbox could be any OS such as Linux or Windows, but the jumpbox is the secure entry point, deployed to a management subnet, requiring secure SSH (ideally with a private key vs. username and password) with ingress and ...
DevOps and Finance
Premier Developer consultant Ron Vincent recently posted this article on the relationship between Finance and modern software development practices such as Agile and DevOps. It’s an interesting discussion of how you can bring finance and planning along on your DevOps journey.I know, who wants to talk about finance when it comes to software development? Well, I do. Here’s why: It turns out that this has a huge impact on software development. In this article I’ll explain why finance is important and what steps we can use to change our organization so that we can develop software and more importantly innovate ...
One user scenario to rule them all
The async series Almost every non-trivial behavior of the async methods in C# can be explained based on one user scenario: migration of the existing synchronous code to asynchronous should be as simple as possible. You should be able to add keyword before a method's return type, add suffix to its name, add keyword here and there in the method body to get a fully functional asynchronous method. This "simple" scenario drastically affects the behavior of asynchronous methods in many different ways: from scheduling task's continuations to exception handling. The scenario sounds plausibl...
LUIS & Speech API Integration
Ever wondered how to integrate speech and AI into your application? It’s easy with this tutorial from Premier Developer consultants Adel Ghabboun and Kunal Sinha! Have you ever wondered what are some of the technologies behind personal home assistants such as Cortana, Alexa and Home? Whether you want to tell your personal AI to open Spotify and play a song for you or schedule a meeting on your calendar, Microsoft’s Cognitive Services along with LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) AI can provide you with exactly this functionality. In this blog, we’ll be talking about how to integrate the ...