Developer Support
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Visual Studio App Center
This overview of Visual Studio App Center comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Sana Noorani. One of Microsoft’s newest offerings, the Visual Studio App Center, is a tool for streamlining the DevOps pipeline for mobile development. The product is an updated version of its previous product, Mobile Center, and has many more features than its predecessor that allows developers go to this singular platform to take care of all their mobile application needs. App Center allows for continuous everything – continuous build, test, deploy, monitor, and repeat. The platforms that are offered currently include An...
Get Excited About Microsoft Flow
Need to set up a workflow between applications or services but don’t know where to start? Check out this post about Microsoft Flow from Premier Developer consultant Daisy Chaussee to learn how to make services talk to each other without even writing one line of code!Microsoft Flow creates automated workflows between apps and services. You can get notifications when you receive an email from your boss or save email attachments to OneDrive. Even more exciting, a flow can be integrated into a PowerApps application or SharePoint site. All of this is immensely powerful, but what really caught my attention was th...
[Service Fabric] Auto-scaling your Service Fabric cluster–Part II
In the second post in his series on Auto-scaling a Service Fabric cluster, Premier Developer consultant Larry Wall highlights a new feature that allows you to tie auto-scaling to an Application Insights metric. In Part I of this article, I demonstrated how to set up auto-scaling on the Service Fabric clusters scale set based on a metric that is part of a VM scale set (Percentage CPU). This setting doesn't have much to do at all with the applications that are running in your cluster, it's just a pure hardware scaling that may take place because of your services CPU consumption or some other thing consuming ...
Application Insights Debug Snapshot issue “Unexpected error has occurred”
This post on the Debug Snapshot feature of Application Insights comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Adel Ghabboun. A couple of days ago, I encountered an ambiguous issue while trying to open the debug snapshot feature in Application Insights following Debug snapshots on exceptions in .NET apps. The error was “Unexpected error has occurred. We are currently having issues with this request. Please open this page again and try again, if problem persists please file a support ticket or contact us directly” as shown below: I was working on a test application to try out the Remote debug feat...
Code Reviews and fishing
In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard discussed the human side of code reviews…Years ago, before I joined Microsoft, a team at one of the companies I worked for decided to start doing code reviews. This was back before modern IDEs that would show you side by side code comparisons with color highlighting of the proposed changes. And before VSTS which allows you to annotate the code that you’re looking at — add questions, notes, or recommendations about the code you’re reviewing — which is kept as metadata for the code. All good stuff.Continue reading on Jim’s blog…
PowerAppsPuzzle: @ vs # == Cryptic Error
In today’s post, Premier Developer consultant Brian Gregor is back with another installment in his PowerAppsPuzzle series!Hey folks! We are back with another PowerAppsPuzzle this week. This time we are trying to track down the source of a very cryptic error message. I am working on a solution for a PowerApp that integrates with SharePoint Online and for this particular solution I cannot rely on the built in form functionality that we get when using the wizard -- "App from data". So this time I had to manually create the form by adding controls to a screen and then using the Patch() formula.Continue reading ...
Alternative way to protect your Application Insights “Instrumentation Key” in JavaScript
This post on Application Insights and protecting your instrumentation key comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Adel Ghabboun. Application Insights instrumentation key can be used in both Server and client side. Using the instrumentation key in the server side is secured and no one can see it. The opposite happens on the client side “JavaScript” where the instrumentation key is exposed, and anyone could see the key whenever they use fiddler to trace the calls. Knowing that, the instrumentation key doesn’t allow anyone to read anything from anywhere, it can only be used to write data to a resource. ...
First Look Into Blockchain
There’s been a ton of buzz about Blockchain lately (Bitcoin anyone?) so what better time to highlight this video from Premier Developer consultant Razi Rais on understanding Blockchain technology. Since last year, I have been spending time with customers understanding how blockchain can help them improve/replace existing processes. It’s relatively a new technology but evolving very fast. Anyways, recorded an hour long video session First Look Into Blockchain for Channel9. It’s predominately focused on blockchain from developers perspective. https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/1f57/913ef57a-5f08-44c1-8648-01f6638d1f57/ToP...
Amazon Alexa Skills authenticated by Azure Active Directory and backed by ASP.NET Core 2.0 Web API hosted on Azure
This post is provided by Premier Field Engineer, Nathan Vanderby, who walks us through how to write an Alexa skill using .NET core and AAD. Lasted updated, June 2018. Amazon's Echo devices and Alexa assistant need no introduction. In this post I lay out how you can write an Alexa skill and use a .NET core 2.0 API backend service to handle the requests. We will also show how to leverage Azure Active Directory (AAD) so these calls can be authenticated and your users can get a personalized experience. Rob Reilly has a great write up on how to accomplish this using .NET Core 1.0. Here we'll update the tutoria...