Developer Support
Advocacy and Innovation
Latest posts
Easily deploy SonarQube Server in Azure
The Visual Studio ALM Rangers are a great asset to the VS ALM community, providing important guidance and sharing knowledge from real world experience. Premier Developer’s own Kevin Mack and Steve St. Jean team up with the Rangers to spotlight SonarQube integration and deployment with Azure. Technical Debt is a growing problem for many development teams, and as these teams embrace DevOps, the problem is becoming more pronounced. While SonarQube is a great tool for resolving this problem, it does pose its own issues with deployment. The biggest roadblock to adoption for many organizations is the configuration ...
SQL Server 2016: It Just Runs Faster
Does the marketing live up to the hype? Senior ADM, Paul King shares some perspective from the field. Upgrading between major versions of a product can sometimes be a painful and time consuming task. Development organizations often have to spend time going over depreciated feature lists to make sure that their applications will still work. Many times, unless there is a new feature in the latest and greatest version of a product, companies are not compelled to upgrade their applications. Part of the marketing message around SQL Server 2016 is ‘It Just Runs Faster’. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, I want to...
New project type has XAML forms by default
Recently on his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Joe Healy highlighted some new templates available to Xamarin developers in Visual Studio. See below for the full article, but also be sure to check out Joe’s DevFish blog for lots more great content! Xamarin has some great documentation. The article at [ https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/xaml/xaml-basics/getting_started_with_xaml/ ] shows how to get started with Xaml by using the Blank Xaml App ( Xamarin.Forms Portable ) template. Xamarin New Forms Portable The Blank Xaml App template sets up a project without any Xaml, just C# classes f...
US Workshops, Webcasts, and Tech Talks – October 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 ...
HockeyApp replacing App Insights…definitely not…
There has been a lot of chatter about the roadmap and direction of Application Insights in relation to HockeyApp. Senior Application Development Manager, Brian Swiger, sums it up. In Summary: App Insights originally shipped with a set of SDKs for mobile platforms that pushed telemetry data into the App Insights pipeline. It is these SDKs that are being deprecated in favor of the HockeyApp SDK, not all of App Insights. Read the full story here. Premier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essential services to help teams optimize...
Loading paged and related data from MS Graph API into Power BI using a recursive Power Query function
Senior Application Development Manager, Robert Reilly, recently came upon a situation where he needed to provide enhanced, adhoc, and drillable reporting based on a mix of data sources. Leveraging Microsoft Graph API for customer data and using Power BI, he explores the power of using these technologies together to build a solution and shared his story. Our customer had already completed a federation and sync of their Active Directory to Azure AD. Since we determined the need to correlate data back to the customers Internal business units(departments) and our data included the customers email address, we fig...
Referencing a PCL project in both ASP.NET Core and Xamarin Forms
Thanks to Premier Developer Consultant Gustavo Varo for this prescriptive guidance on cross-platform development with Xamarin and ASP.NET Core. Back in March while working with Xamarin Forms and ASP.NET Core, I identified the need of sharing some code between both projects. My very first idea was to create a PCL (Portable Class Library) project and reference in both of the projects. Unfortunately, at that time both Xamarin Forms projects and ASP.NET Core projects were very different and could not support that. See bug a filed: #1356 Time has passed and a lot of things have changed. Xamarin added the support...
Using Azure AD to authenticate public clients to SQL Azure
In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Marius Rochon shows how to use Azure AD to authenticate public clients to SQL Azure. Azure AD enables access authorization to SQL Azure as an alternative to providing username/password information in the connection string: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-aad-authentication/. It is somewhat analogous to using Windows Authentication when both the client and the database are on a Windows domain network. It is particularly useful on public (non-confidential) clients where storing secrets is inappropriate and the only...
Docker Blog Series Part 1- Building ASP.NET Core Application using Docker For Windows.
In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo shows how to build ASP.NET Core Application using Docker For Windows. Applications and their set of user expectations continue to evolve over the last few years. We have seen various trends like microservices and containerization become mainstream. The enterprises are beginning to realize the cost savings and other benefits of these technologies. It therefore becomes incumbent to build applications and service with this mindset. In this blog post, I will explain some of the foundational aspects of containerization and showcase ‘Dock...