Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
Latest posts
Dissecting the code: yet another programmer’s blog
Hi everyone. My name is Sergey Tepliakov; I’m Senior Software Engineer at TSE(*) team at Microsoft. At my day-to-day job I’m working on a next-gen build engine with tons of very useful capabilities. But don’t worry, I’m not going to dig into this topic. At least for now:) Before joining Microsoft 2 years ago, I’ve been a Microsoft C# MVP. And here I’m going to focus on various topics that I’m very interested in: software design, C# language, unit testing and some other stuff. I’ve been blogging for 8 years in Russian with my ‘Programming Stuff’ blog and today I want to share my insights with a broader audience! L...
How to Import Related Data into Dynamics 365
In this post, Senior ADM Justin Scott walks us through how to maintain entity/table relationships when importing data into Dynamics 365. A recent project I was on involved bringing over customer and contact information from another proprietary CRM application. Being newer to the Dynamics platform, one challenge was to figure out how to maintain the relationships between two related tables (tables are known as “entities” in Dynamics 365), such as the case we had here between Companies and Contacts. In the application that we were importing data from, there was a 1:N foreign key relationship between the companie...
Rollback tests with TFS/VSTS
In this post, Premier ADM Mike Lapierre covers techniques to rollback bulk editing changes with TFS test cases. I was assisting a customer recently who was working on many TFS test cases, using Excel for bulk editing. The Excel integration is great for editing regular fields but it can’t handle HTML fields like the description or the test steps. When such a field is modified, the following message is displayed. We all take time to read such messages, right? Okay, maybe not all the time. Once you publish the test cases and the damage is done, how can you get back to the previous state? The short answer ...
Amazon Alexa Skills Development with Azure Active Directory and ASP.NET Core 1.0 Web API
In this post, Premier ADM, Rob Reilly, walks us through building Alexa Skills using Azure AD and ASP.NET Core Web API. Background Amazon Alexa is a technology developed by Amazon that takes voice commands, interprets them, and then takes action by sending requests on to API’s to perform a multitude of tasks only limited by your imagination. Amazon offer various devices that can be used to take the requests from the user and act on the request. Examples of this are the TAP and the Echo and are essentially smart speakers. The bundling of this functionality into offering is known as creating an Alexa Skill a...
One less click to download with Edge
This timesaver is shared by Premier ADM, Billy Sun with a simple tweak that can save you a few extra clicks downloading content with Edge. Ever since the release of Windows 10 and Spartan beta in early 2015, Edge has always been the default browser for the new OS. Unless you change the default manually, everything that would trigger the launch of IE in the past will now launch Edge instead. This preference never created an issue until I started updating newer Visual Studio extensions. In the past when you want to update an extension in Visual Studio, if it isn't an in-place install, IE would get launched an...
Migrating SQL Workloads? Check out Database Experimentation Assistant
Considering the impact of a SQL upgrade? In this post, Application Development Manager Omer Amin spotlights Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA). Customers who are upgrading from previous SQL server versions (starting 2005 and above) to any new version of the SQL server will be able to use analysis metrics to help them build higher confidence, making it a successful upgrade experience. Often, I am asked what the impact would be to upgrade to a new version of SQL. Microsoft does an amazing job, but short of scouring the release notes or deploying to the new version and running a full test, it was very diff...
Technical Debt: A change in perspective
In a recent post from his blog, Premier ADM Shawn Gaul puts a metaphorical spin on Technical Debt with Steve St. Jean and Marty Donovan. This series demonstrates how a metaphor can be used to change the way you look at this problem and thereby help to understand ways to overcome it. With that change in perspective, we’ll look at ways to tackle it and ensure your team continues to provide productive business value. We needed a way of looking at this debt in a different light. The metaphor at this point wasn’t helping us anymore. In a lot of ways, it was painting a very scary image, one that was w...
US Workshops, Webcasts, and Tech Talks – Nov/Dec 2016 Update
Teams struggle to keep up with the latest technology trends, so training and knowledge transfer are important investments to build the expertise required for optimal application and infrastructure. It’s a great way to proactively stay in front of technical gaps that can manifest in the form of implementation delays, architectural problems, and/or costly production outages. Premier Support for Developers provides access to a wide range of advisory and training options that include most popular developer technologies. Options range from onsite, instructor-led workshops to remote training, and even access to ...
How to work around an issue with VSTS build agents for the Mac, when building Xamarin Forms apps for iOS
In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard shows how to work around a potential issue you might run into when building a Xamarin Forms app for iOS on your Mac. Heads up if you’re running VSTS build agent on a Mac for Xamarin.Forms iOS projects. You may see this error message from the NuGet package restore step: "To connect to NuGet feeds hosted in your Team Services account/TFS project collection with NuGet 3.1 or below, edit your build definition to specify a path to a NuGet.config containing the package sources you wish to use." Continue reading on Jim’s blog…