Developer Support
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Bots on Azure – Not as Complex as it Sounds
This post is provided by Dan Simmons, a Technical Delivery Manager within our team here at Premier Support for Developers. I was having a discussion with a colleague about how customers will help you better understand them. I had asked if they had thought about putting a bot on their webpage to help them with this and she said they had not mainly because the cost would be exorbitant to build. In my naivety, I suggested it would likely take me even only 2-3 days to create something which they could use and someone on my team (talented developers) could likely do it within hours. She was astonished and I was no...
Parsing folders in Power BI and adding the folder name as a column in the Power Query
Senior Application Development Manager, Robert Reilly, walks us through parsing multiple files contained in multiple folders from Power BI. On occasion you may have a need to parse multiple files contained in multiple folders from Power BI. As an example I am working with a colleague to generate some Power BI reports from CSV data files he has created some custom code to create by pulling data from another system. The code he uses creates a new folder that's name is a timestamp of the day the job was run. The same 5 report names exists in each timestamp folder. Since Power BI does not currently support cre...
DigiCert Certificate Management through Azure Key Vault
In a recent post from his blog, Application Development Manager Christian Reddington walked us through an introduction to Azure Key Vault. Azure Key Vault helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services. It streamlines the key management process, enabling you to maintain control of keys that access and encrypt your data. Developers can create keys for development and testing in minutes, and then seamlessly migrate them to production keys. Security administrators can grant (and revoke) permission to keys, as needed. When designing a solution, you want to be sure th...
Multi-tenant WebAPI – simple admin consent
In this post, Premier Developer consultant Marius Rochon shares his application authentication experience in order to help you create your own Multi-tenant WebAPI applications. The VS.NET 2015 wizard for adding authentication to ASP.NET WebAPI projects does not support using the multi-tenant option. Here are some notes on how to implement this option yourself and create OAuth2 access tokens to such resources using separate tenants. This is not meant as an attempt to document features – rather as a record of my own experience in this area. Read the rest of Marius’ blog, along with code samples, here: https://blo...
What are Microservices and Why Should You Care?
Thanks to Premier Developer Consultant Najib Zarrari for sharing this excellent article on Microservices and the changing nature of software architecture in the industry today. Context Nowadays, trends show that market conditions are changing constantly and at a pace we have never seen before. New companies come into mature industries and completely disrupt them while existing companies that have been around for a long time are struggling to survive and to hold on to their market share. Also, building highly available and resilient software has become an essential competency no matter what business ...
Understanding different GC modes with Concurrency Visualizer
In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance. I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap, for instance from the following article – “Fundamentals of Garbage Collection” or from a chapter in your favorite book on C#/.NET (*). The Garbage Collector in the CLR is a very complicated, configurable and self-tuning creature that may change behavior based on application needs. To satisfy different memory...
Unit testing using Typescript, Mocha, Chai, Sinon, and Karma
In this post, Premier Developer consultant Wael Kdouh outlines how to set up a unit testing project using Typescript, Mocha, Chai, Sinon and Karma. I was trying to setup a project for unit testing using Typescript, Mocha, Chai, Sinon, and Karma and I quickly realized that there were so many moving parts that made it a bit challenging to setup the project. Here are the detailed steps for successfully creating a JavaScript unit testing project using the aforementioned technologies. TL/DR: The code is available on GitHub. Continue reading on Wael's blog
Premier Support Helps Keep Santa Flying
Each year, NORAD Tracks Santa across the globe in an event that captures the heart of children and adults worldwide. Families can take part using a range of applications and devices to watch Santa’s progress in real time. Premier ADMs, Chris Mason, Bernard Apolinario, and developer consultant Geoff Gray share a glimpse of what goes into keeping Santa flying during this magical event. Overview Since 2012, Premier Support for Developers (PSfD) has been helping with the yearly NORAD Tracks Santa event. This fun, community project involves a collaboration of our implementation partners: iLink Systems, Inc. and An...
Dissecting the ActionBlock: a Short Story About a Nasty Deadlock
I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and the thread pool will do its best to maximize application throughput by using optimal number of threads that will process the input data. But using the thread pool is not always possible and/or appropriate. Even though you can control minimum and maximum number of thr...