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Building the business of tomorrow with developers today
April 8, 2019Apr 8, 201904/8/19One of the challenges was figuring out a way to get the commercial software installed and configured on the virtual machines in a completely automated fashion, which is where Azure Automation DSC fit into the solution. DSC or Desired State Configuration is not a new concept, but I recently learned that Azure Automation can be used as a DSC pull server that hosts your DSC configurations and resources in a convenient location.
April 7, 2019Apr 7, 201904/7/19Azure Trust Center should be your first destination for our compliance offerings. Did you know independent audit reports along with Azure compliance offerings can be found there? This documentation is a free, but protected resource for those that utilize Microsoft cloud services (Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, etc.). Compliance documentation for HITrust, HIPPA/HITECH, FedRAMP, CSA CCM and many others are stored here.
April 6, 2019Apr 6, 201904/6/19In this post, I’ll show you how to create reusable canvas components for your PowerApps. For this example, I’m going to create a control to display today’s date, visualized as one of those daily tear-off calendars you might have seen at some point on someone’s desk. Since the component will be reusable on multiple screens, I’ll add properties to the control to set the data and visual configurations. I’ll also show how to use relative sizing to scale the controls when the component is resized, and how to scale font sizes as well.
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19The inherent nature of the cloud is that there can be momentary loss of network connectivity, temporary loss of service, and timeouts that can occur for a variety of reasons. By designing your application to handle these types of events gracefully, you can improve availability and minimize impact from transient events.
April 4, 2019Apr 4, 201904/4/19This article is written to show you how to run Windows on a Mac that doesn’t have enough local storage by working around issue using an external USB drive and Windows To Go product to create image.
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19This example illustrates why building a better UI and caring about how your end users is so valuable. Not only can it improve their experience, but it can also save your business time and money.
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19One thing that I’ve heard more than a few times while working in UX is that you can’t put a price on look and feel. Personally, I want to clear the air right now and say you absolutely can. It’s not hard, but it does require narrowing your focus to a particular workflow.
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19From the ready-to-consume set of Azure Cognitive Services to the comprehensive set of tools for data scientists available in Azure Machine Learning Service, there are many ways to apply AI into your products and services.
April 1, 2019Apr 1, 201904/1/19In this post, we’ll look at how to use SVG images and some formulas to create a digital alarm clock style display in PowerApps. This is going to involve some image manipulation, so I’ll use one of my favorite free vector programs, Inkscape, to create SVG files that can be used in the clock display. I’ll also be using a free-for-commercial use digital clock font for this example (thanks to the author).
March 28, 2019Mar 28, 201903/28/19It’s no secret that you can run a local version of Kubernetes on Docker Desktop for Windows, however, getting the Dashboard installed and configured correctly can be challenging. The problem is that the default installation requires you to manage an admin user and copy that user's bearer token into the portal to login.
AI
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19From the ready-to-consume set of Azure Cognitive Services to the comprehensive set of tools for data scientists available in Azure Machine Learning Service, there are many ways to apply AI into your products and services.
September 4, 2018Sep 4, 201809/4/18
Microsoft’s vision is to democratize AI and make it accessible and valuable to everyone. Join us to learn how to start building intelligence into your solutions with the Microsoft AI platform, including pre-trained AI services like Cognitive Services and Bot Framework, as well as deep learning tools like Azure Machine Learning.
May 25, 2018May 25, 201805/25/18In this post, Consultant/App. Dev. Manager Timothy Baillis explains how AI and Bots can improve modern UI designs.
It has been said that every great developer is inherently lazy- or at least inspired by boring or repetitive tasks.
April 23, 2018Apr 23, 201804/23/18In this post, Principal Consultant/ADM Larry Duff discuss some ethical challenges in Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has been a dream of computer scientists for many years. I remember my early days of programming I had a Commodore Pet.
February 13, 2018Feb 13, 201802/13/18Ever 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,
April 20, 2017Apr 20, 201704/20/17Senior Application Development Manager, Justin Scott, launched a new podcast this month you will want to check out. AI exposed looks at the world of Artificial Intelligence– discussing some of the latest trends, interviewing industry experts,
ALM
March 8, 2019Mar 8, 201903/8/19Depending on what version of TFS you intend to migrate and what features you are using, there are a few things that in my opinion are “major” considerations because they have the potential of adding scope to your migration efforts. While you will find out about them as you read through the official migration guide, I believe there is value to knowing these things prior to embarking in such journey.
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19The reason for this post is to help customers realize how to satisfy the CFR – Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, PART 11 ELECTRONIC RECORDS; ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES requirements with Team Foundation Server, Azure DevOps Service and Azure DevOps Server.
March 2, 2019Mar 2, 201903/2/19I was working on a DevOps scenario that involved automating the deployment of batch process files from one server to one or more other servers. To accomplish this, I created a build pipeline to collect certain files from the staging location and store them as Build Artifacts. I then created a release pipeline to ask for deployment approval and then deploy the build artifacts to servers in other environments.
February 26, 2019Feb 26, 201902/26/19Azure Lab services is a quick and easy way to manage environments for your team in the cloud. It is versatile enough to set up development environments, testing and even classroom lab environments. The service handles all the infrastructure, user management, and now scheduling when the lab is available. The ability to stop a lab VM has been around for some time, but the ability to schedule when a VM starts, how long it remains up and then when it is to shut down recently became available.
February 25, 2019Feb 25, 201902/25/19 Prior to Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2017, moving or cloning of a TFS instance required manual preparation and configuration of existing instance’s backups. You can now configure your restored databases completely through the application tier.
This blog walks through the new process to demonstrate how to restore and configure an instance of TFS to new hardware.
January 16, 2019Jan 16, 201901/16/19This article is part 2 of DevOps and Culture. See part 1 here. In this entry I’ll discuss how we can think of culture in a systematic way and how we can change it.
January 16, 2019Jan 16, 201901/16/19Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is a great introduction to how we think about DevOps and in this article, I’m going to unpack this statement so that we have a bit more context. This is the first part of multiple articles on culture as it relates to DevOps.
December 23, 2018Dec 23, 201812/23/18This project simplifies the setup of a SonarQube server to one step. Simply click the Deploy to Azure link on the project homepage and follow the simple walkthrough to have resources deployed out and configured.
October 29, 2018Oct 29, 201810/29/18If part of this transition requires that aspects from the legacy process be kept, it’s a great opportunity to demonstrate that through the use of agile process and agile tools, we can have an even better control of the value (beyond just software) that the development team is creating for the company.
October 23, 2018Oct 23, 201810/23/18I have been working on a small project in my free time in which I’m the only developer. When I started the project, I wanted to write the entire application in a test driven, test first, manner. I wrote my failing test, then made the test pass and as I saw opportunities to refactor, I took the time to reduce complexity, separate concerns and reorganize as needed. I was in a red-green-refactor rhythm and it was enjoyable to see the test count go up and my code coverage for tests at 100%… but then reality set in.
Angular
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18In an agile development environment, there may be partially completed features or features with external dependencies that are not ready. Instead of relying on multiple code branches, instead you may opt for deploying code with a feature turned off. Later, that feature should be turned on via a configuration or database change. This post provides sample code that you can use to implement feature flags in your Angular app.
October 24, 2018Oct 24, 201810/24/18This is an update post to a previous article published in April 2017 explaining how to wrap ADAL.js with Angular2+. The previous article is no longer relevant given the changes to the Angular framework. This new post explains a reimplementation which uses the PathLocationStrategy and Angular features such as HttpInterceptor and InjectionToken.
March 7, 2018Mar 7, 201803/7/18Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Consultant, shows us how to customize the behavior of an Angular app based on the user’s permissions. This includes page navigation, hiding and disabling of UI elements, and generation of menus.
Applications often include requirements to customize their appearance and behavior based on the user’s role or permission.
March 1, 2018Mar 1, 201803/1/18The Angular-CLI is the recommended way to build a production-ready app, complete with bundling, uglifying, and tree-shaking. An Angular-CLI generated application even comes with a mechanism for creating environment-specific versions. However, those configuration files are in TypeScript and do not allow editing by IT staff or automated deployment tools such as VSTS. This post provides the steps and code samples for using a JSON configuration file, which can be customized for multiple environments.
June 14, 2017Jun 14, 201706/14/17Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Senior Consultant, A few tweaks are necessary to take an Angular app and move it to IIS. Here is a list of changes required to get everything running smoothly.
Using the Angular-CLI to generate an Angular SPA is an excellent way to scaffold out a well-organized application.
May 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17Laurie Atkinson, Senior Premier Developer Consultant, outlines the steps and pieces you need to add logging and telemetry to an Angular SPA using Application Insights
Application Insights is an Azure service for monitoring web applications.
April 27, 2017Apr 27, 201704/27/17This post from Senior Premier Developer Consultant Laurie Atkinson gives you a step-by-step guide to getting started with Angular development.
Follow these steps to get up and running with an Angular application including source control,
Async
February 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code,
Availability
November 9, 2018Nov 9, 201811/9/18In a previous post I discussed an approach to handling backend redundancy using Azure API Manager (APIM). In this post I want to discuss the various options for providing a high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to your services exposed by API Manager.
Azure
April 8, 2019Apr 8, 201904/8/19One of the challenges was figuring out a way to get the commercial software installed and configured on the virtual machines in a completely automated fashion, which is where Azure Automation DSC fit into the solution. DSC or Desired State Configuration is not a new concept, but I recently learned that Azure Automation can be used as a DSC pull server that hosts your DSC configurations and resources in a convenient location.
April 7, 2019Apr 7, 201904/7/19Azure Trust Center should be your first destination for our compliance offerings. Did you know independent audit reports along with Azure compliance offerings can be found there? This documentation is a free, but protected resource for those that utilize Microsoft cloud services (Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, etc.). Compliance documentation for HITrust, HIPPA/HITECH, FedRAMP, CSA CCM and many others are stored here.
April 6, 2019Apr 6, 201904/6/19In this post, I’ll show you how to create reusable canvas components for your PowerApps. For this example, I’m going to create a control to display today’s date, visualized as one of those daily tear-off calendars you might have seen at some point on someone’s desk. Since the component will be reusable on multiple screens, I’ll add properties to the control to set the data and visual configurations. I’ll also show how to use relative sizing to scale the controls when the component is resized, and how to scale font sizes as well.
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19From the ready-to-consume set of Azure Cognitive Services to the comprehensive set of tools for data scientists available in Azure Machine Learning Service, there are many ways to apply AI into your products and services.
April 1, 2019Apr 1, 201904/1/19In this post, we’ll look at how to use SVG images and some formulas to create a digital alarm clock style display in PowerApps. This is going to involve some image manipulation, so I’ll use one of my favorite free vector programs, Inkscape, to create SVG files that can be used in the clock display. I’ll also be using a free-for-commercial use digital clock font for this example (thanks to the author).
March 28, 2019Mar 28, 201903/28/19Microsoft and Pluralsight have partnered to give Azure learners access to 46 Pluralsight video courses. Anyone who redeems this benefit can use all Pluralsight features available to individual subscribers, including paths, Skill IQ, channels, and notes.
March 27, 2019Mar 27, 201903/27/19On this episode of the On.NET Show, ADM Isaac Levin talks about how we can better triage issues in Production environments using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Snapshot Debugger, SnapPoints and LogPoints.
March 21, 2019Mar 21, 201903/21/19Running Linux containers on a Windows host has been available for awhile now. However, getting Windows and Linux containers to communicate without Docker Compose results in using the containers’ IP Addresses. This is not a good solution since container IP Addresses change often.
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19In this post, App Dev Manager Shany Wiesel explains the different deployment models for Apache Cassandra on Azure.
Microsoft Azure is an open cloud platform that runs both Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft software which includes operating systems,
March 11, 2019Mar 11, 201903/11/19One of the questions that I get asked very regularly by customers, colleagues, and friends is “Why do I need to move my … to the cloud?“ Almost every time this question comes up, the conversation very quickly gets into technical capabilities of the cloud, cost saving or the last service that this or that cloud vendor has released. These are all valid reasons, but that’s not what drives people, teams, or organizations.
Data
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19In this post, App Dev Manager Shany Wiesel explains the different deployment models for Apache Cassandra on Azure.
Microsoft Azure is an open cloud platform that runs both Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft software which includes operating systems,
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
November 28, 2018Nov 28, 201811/28/18While on-premises, most applications did not take advantage of securing communications to the database on the wire just because of the inherent isolation advantages of having the application ONLY on the internal LAN. However, as more and more of these applications start moving to the cloud, the security of data over the wire is rightfully starting to gain increased importance.
November 14, 2018Nov 14, 201811/14/18While Cosmos DB offloads many of the hard NoSQL scaling problems, shaping your data and choosing a logical partition key are left to you. The partition key choice is arguably the most important decision you’ll need to make – it cannot be changed and must be determined upon creation of a collection.
November 8, 2018Nov 8, 201811/8/18My customers have spent some time working with Azure Cosmos DB and had questions around pricing. I thought I would share a bit of what I have learned when it comes to pricing for Cosmos DB for this BLOG article.
September 27, 2018Sep 27, 201809/27/18Dev Consultant Julien Oudot demonstrates how to automate the testing of a data layer in ASP.NET Core WEB API with Cosmos DB.
June 21, 2018Jun 21, 201806/21/18This post is provided by Premier Field Engineer JJ Jacob who takes a look at the benefits of SQL Server Objects as software artifacts.
A recent customer engagement revealed several pain-points. One of them is the issue of not being able to pinpoint the exact database schema the development team delivered to the production team.
March 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18In this article, Application Development Manager Steve Keeler outlines an approach for determining the domain identity of a user who has initiated a stop, start, or restart request on SQL Server services. Although SQL Server contains server and database auditing functionality as part of the product,
March 3, 2018Mar 3, 201803/3/18In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Alexei Govorine, demonstrates how to use SQL JOIN and MAX in a query.
How to join two SQL tables and display the latest results.
Recently a customer has asked me to help them with a query design.
February 12, 2018Feb 12, 201802/12/18In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Nayan Patel introduces SQL Server PolyBase and shares some insights from a recent engagement using the technology.
I was recently involved in helping my customer complete a successful PoC around SQL Server 2016’s PolyBase feature.
DevOps
March 8, 2019Mar 8, 201903/8/19Depending on what version of TFS you intend to migrate and what features you are using, there are a few things that in my opinion are “major” considerations because they have the potential of adding scope to your migration efforts. While you will find out about them as you read through the official migration guide, I believe there is value to knowing these things prior to embarking in such journey.
March 5, 2019Mar 5, 201903/5/19I was recently working with one of my customers to help them improve the usability of their applications as mandated by their IT staff. The goal was to create quality web applications that can be equally useful to all users including those with disabilities. Together, we reviewed many good tools and potential best practices, but we wanted something that would specifically run as part of the application release process.
January 21, 2019Jan 21, 201901/21/19 What I wanted to accomplish here was simply to create a redistributable Python package. Also show some of the practices on how to work with Python in a Windows environment, but I could not stop there.
I went ahead and built a complete CI/CD pipeline for the package, showing how easy it is and how well Python projects integrate with Azure DevOps.
January 16, 2019Jan 16, 201901/16/19This article is part 2 of DevOps and Culture. See part 1 here. In this entry I’ll discuss how we can think of culture in a systematic way and how we can change it.
January 16, 2019Jan 16, 201901/16/19Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is a great introduction to how we think about DevOps and in this article, I’m going to unpack this statement so that we have a bit more context. This is the first part of multiple articles on culture as it relates to DevOps.
December 27, 2018Dec 27, 201812/27/18Build a Boot web project, create a Dockerfile, build a Docker image, then run it in Docker.
December 26, 2018Dec 26, 201812/26/18VS Code can really be the platform of choice to benefit from the best features. Furthermore, its cross platform support allow users to have the same customer experience on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).
December 22, 2018Dec 22, 201812/22/18Why is it that some organizations, though they may invest great expense in tools, process development, and rigor, fail to obtain the transformation and benefits other organizations have so greatly experienced?
November 16, 2018Nov 16, 201811/16/18The "lift-and-shift" approach with Azure IaaS can only deliver on small measure of the promise of agility and innovation in the Cloud when compared to modernized application (i.e., Cloud-optimized). Modernizing application with Azure PaaS, on the other hand, can deliver on the promise of agility and innovation to a great extent. It reduces the time required to manage the application and the time required to deploy a new release, and optimizes the speed to market.
November 9, 2018Nov 9, 201811/9/18In a previous post I discussed an approach to handling backend redundancy using Azure API Manager (APIM). In this post I want to discuss the various options for providing a high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to your services exposed by API Manager.
Events
September 28, 2017Sep 28, 201709/28/17In this post, Senior App Dev Managers, Latha Natarajan and Sujith Nair reflect on some of the improvements and announcements from Build 2017 that made it even easier to enable your cloud transformation. If you have been meaning to review the buzz from build,
May 12, 2017May 12, 201705/12/17ADM’s Bill Bevan, Marty Donovan, Russ Clark, Joseph Flanigen, joined Garrett Jacobs (Services Market Strategy Director) representing Premier Developer @ BUILD 2017.
With another exciting Microsoft Build conference coming to a close, we’re inspired for the future,
May 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17Developers from around the world came together this week as our Build Conference kicked off in Seattle. It’s always an inspiring time to hear new product announcements and seeing many new technologies in action for the first time. Build is sensory overload to anyone who loves technology,
August 4, 2016Aug 4, 201608/4/16In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Neal Champion shares an overview of the UK Dev Briefing Day. This annual event typically runs in the spring of each year, covering up-to-date presentations on the latest tools and development capabilities for the Microsoft platform.
IoT
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19The inherent nature of the cloud is that there can be momentary loss of network connectivity, temporary loss of service, and timeouts that can occur for a variety of reasons. By designing your application to handle these types of events gracefully, you can improve availability and minimize impact from transient events.
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19In this post, App Dev Manager, Robert Schumann shows how to get started with Windows 10 IoT Core with Raspberry Bi 3 B+.
Jumping right in, let’s get a few matters out of the way upfront.
December 21, 2018Dec 21, 201812/21/18This is going to be an IoT solution, which receives data from connected devices, stores the data and makes it available for consumption by a holographic or mobile application. So, you will first learn to set up the backend infrastructure--where you will have a device--which connects with a Cloud Gateway. Data received by the Cloud Gateway is stored within persistent storage, and finally, this data will be made available to a Holographic or Mobile app through Web APIs.
November 7, 2018Nov 7, 201811/7/18Have you ever tried building an IoT solution on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi with an ARM processor? What languages did you have to use? What if that device had to send data to the cloud for dashboarding and alerting? How would you build the dashboard and manage alerts for authorized users?
June 4, 2018Jun 4, 201806/4/18In the fourth post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about how to configure within the Azure IoT Hub.
In the first part of this series,
June 1, 2018Jun 1, 201806/1/18In the third post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about writing the code for the sensor rig to send telemetry data to Azure IoT Hub.
May 29, 2018May 29, 201805/29/18In the second post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about developing the IoT sensor rig.
In the first part of this series,
May 17, 2018May 17, 201805/17/18Premier Developer Consultant, Steve St Jean, shares a personal story on how he used Azure IoT to figure out a solution to a problem that many of us face – high electric bills. In the series, Steve shares the process and code that he used to implement this solution.
Kubernetes
March 28, 2019Mar 28, 201903/28/19It’s no secret that you can run a local version of Kubernetes on Docker Desktop for Windows, however, getting the Dashboard installed and configured correctly can be challenging. The problem is that the default installation requires you to manage an admin user and copy that user's bearer token into the portal to login.
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19In this follow up article, we will cover how it can help to deploy Container images stored into Azure Container Registry (ACR). We will also cover the kubectl explain integration which is helpful to understand the structure of YAML files used to describe Kubernetes API objects.
December 26, 2018Dec 26, 201812/26/18VS Code can really be the platform of choice to benefit from the best features. Furthermore, its cross platform support allow users to have the same customer experience on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).
August 13, 2018Aug 13, 201808/13/18This is the second post in a multi-part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on K8s project together and thought to share out learnings. In the last post, you get to know the application that going to be deployed in the Kubernetes cluster. In this post, you will learn about the tool called “Helm”.
August 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18This is the first post in a multi part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on K8s project together and thought to share out learnings.
ML
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
Mobile
December 7, 2018Dec 7, 201812/7/18I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.
August 23, 2016Aug 23, 201608/23/16In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard shows how to navigate past some of the issues when setting up VSTS builds for a multi-project Xamarin.Forms solution.
The other day I wanted to create a DevOps CI / CD pipeline for a simple Xamarin.Forms app that I’d created.
July 23, 2016Jul 23, 201607/23/16In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Joe Healy shows us how to create global resources in Xamarin Forms.
Xaml developers moving to Xamarin Forms are hoping to take some of their good habits from the Windows (WPF/Silverlight/UWP) dev world with them (probably a few of their bad ones as well but we don’t want to talk about those).
April 22, 2016Apr 22, 201604/22/16In this blog post, Application Development Managers, Derrick Sharpe and Justin Wendlandt, highlight the many options to maximize development productivity across a range of mobile platforms, including Windows 10, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and more.
Contrary to popular belief,
.NET
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Keith Beller walks use through Blazor, a new experimental framework for WebAssembly.
What is Blazor?
After 22 years of dominance as “the” native language for client-side browser interaction, JavaScript is facing new competition from other popular languages such as C/C++,
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19App Dev Managers Anand Shukla and Sash Kavalaparambil provide step by step instruction to run a .NET Core Web Application in Docker container using Docker Desktop for Windows.
December 25, 2018Dec 25, 201812/25/18I was recently engaged in a customer proof of concept scenario where they needed to turn their knowledgebase articles, FAQ’s and other company data into an interactive bot. For our scenario, we created a QnA Maker service that pulled HR information from a backend database so users can ask common questions in a conversational way instead of wasting time searching and scrolling through content.
December 24, 2018Dec 24, 201812/24/18I have been a developer for over 10 years, and I am always looking at new ways to be more productive. May I present you with 6 tips that I have started to adopt that I think have increased my developer skills 1000% (YMMV).
December 21, 2018Dec 21, 201812/21/18This is going to be an IoT solution, which receives data from connected devices, stores the data and makes it available for consumption by a holographic or mobile application. So, you will first learn to set up the backend infrastructure--where you will have a device--which connects with a Cloud Gateway. Data received by the Cloud Gateway is stored within persistent storage, and finally, this data will be made available to a Holographic or Mobile app through Web APIs.
September 7, 2018Sep 7, 201809/7/18Using async methods/lambdas where they are not expected causes unexpected problems. The typical example I discuss with people is TaskFactory.StartNew() because its an easy way to create Tasks and some people reach for that instead of Task.Run(), but I recently came across some code hitting the same problem while creating threads the traditional way.
March 29, 2018Mar 29, 201803/29/18The .NET BotBuilder SDK has deprecated the StateClient class, leaving some to wonder how they should access their bot’s state. Premier Developer Consultant Ben Williams shares an example of using dependency injection in your BotFramework projects.
When using the .NET BotBuilder SDK’s dialog system,
March 23, 2018Mar 23, 201803/23/18In this post, App Dev Managers Robert Schumann and Ben Hlaban, introduce us to Blazor – an experimental web UI framework based on C#, Razor, and HTML that runs in the browser via WebAssembly.
This journey started from a blog by Daniel Roth.
March 13, 2018Mar 13, 201803/13/18Application Development Manage Isaac Levin recently posted this article on building extensions for Application Insights. In this post, he demonstrates how to capture additional HTTP metadata using custom telemetry Initializers for Application Insights.
I will start off by saying I love Application Insights.
January 10, 2018Jan 10, 201801/10/18In Part 3 of this 3 part series, App Dev Manager, Herald Gjura describes how to incorporate these libraries into an existing .NET application.
Part 2: Upgrading the Continuous Delivery and Build/Release pipeline in VSTS
Part 3: Integrating .NET Standard Class Libraries into existing projects
In Part 1 and 2 of this blog series I described how to migrate your old PCL libraries into the .NET Standard ones,
Performance
March 6, 2019Mar 6, 201903/6/19Performance (aka. Perfmon) Counters are critical to understanding the health of and diagnosing issues on Windows. In recent performance and scalability testing of a solution built on top of Azure Service Fabric, we collected Perfmon Counters across 15 VMs and sent them to Log Analytics. This was very helpful; however, there were times when we wanted them to be real time.
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19Do I need to add more servers if my user load grows by 10% each month for the next 12 months? That is a hard question to answer. Unless you have an Application Platform Management solution, it is hard to correlate function calls to CPU time and response times.
Premier
March 13, 2019Mar 13, 201903/13/19Diversity Driven Development (DDD) is concept that I’ve envisioned for some time. DDD can enable you, your team and/or your organization to build software and services that provide solution beyond just the current customer demographic.
March 8, 2019Mar 8, 201903/8/19Laurie Atkinson, Senior Consultant explains how to use the microsoft-adal-angular6 wrapper library to authenticate with Azure Active Directory in your Angular 6+ apps.
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Keith Beller walks use through Blazor, a new experimental framework for WebAssembly.
What is Blazor?
After 22 years of dominance as “the” native language for client-side browser interaction, JavaScript is facing new competition from other popular languages such as C/C++,
March 6, 2019Mar 6, 201903/6/19With this little tidbit of information, we were able to write a powershell script that iterates through a given folder recursively and identifies executables that are dependent on VS Isolated Shell.
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
January 30, 2019Jan 30, 201901/30/19Helping customers to be successful is at our core. Our mission is to ”Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”, and we do that by being customer-obsessed. As an ADM, I’ve had the pleasure of working with customers who challenge me every day with questions that test my knowledge and experience, my ability to learn, my ability to research, and almost paramount, my ability to network amongst the vast expert resources in our consulting, support engineering, and product management teams.
September 20, 2018Sep 20, 201809/20/18Support Escalation Engineer Dan Bagley and App Dev Manager David Huang break down the support options for client-side Exchange ActiveSync development.
June 16, 2018Jun 16, 201806/16/18In this post, Principal Consultant Jon Guerin lays out the benefits of Azure Event Management (AEM) and how to get started with the program.
Deploying an application to Azure in support of a high-profile business event can have many advantages.
June 7, 2018Jun 7, 201806/7/18This post is provided by App Dev Manager Francis Lacroix who spotlights Microsoft Enhanced Application Support.
Custom solutions provided by consultants can sometimes challenge the development groups inheriting them. Perhaps they do not have the skillset to support them and enhance them,
May 3, 2018May 3, 201805/3/18
This post walks through the process of setting up a new support case using Premier Online. Credits to App Dev Managers, Al Mata, Dave Harrison, Charles Ofori, Bharat Suneja,
Security
April 7, 2019Apr 7, 201904/7/19Azure Trust Center should be your first destination for our compliance offerings. Did you know independent audit reports along with Azure compliance offerings can be found there? This documentation is a free, but protected resource for those that utilize Microsoft cloud services (Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, etc.). Compliance documentation for HITrust, HIPPA/HITECH, FedRAMP, CSA CCM and many others are stored here.
December 7, 2018Dec 7, 201812/7/18I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.
November 28, 2018Nov 28, 201811/28/18While on-premises, most applications did not take advantage of securing communications to the database on the wire just because of the inherent isolation advantages of having the application ONLY on the internal LAN. However, as more and more of these applications start moving to the cloud, the security of data over the wire is rightfully starting to gain increased importance.
October 11, 2018Oct 11, 201810/11/18In this post, Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon considers scenarios where an application needs to be accessed by users from many sources of authentication (Office 365, owned and operated by Microsoft but whose use is managed separately by many independent organizations is an example of such a resource). It proposes a framework for determining an optimal solution for the application using Azure AD.
April 30, 2018Apr 30, 201804/30/18In this post, Sr. App Dev Manager Mark Pazicni lays out the capabilities of Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) and Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) to help clarify their applications.
With Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE), your data is just encrypted.
April 8, 2018Apr 8, 201804/8/18Senior Consultant Omar Amin recently posted this article on securing a physical data center. In this post, he highlights roles and responsibility on security across various hosting options.
I don’t spend a lot of time talking to customers about physical data center security.
March 22, 2018Mar 22, 201803/22/18This post is provided by App Dev Managers Latha Natarajan and Sujith Nair who explore the critical aspect of protecting personal information and the impact of data security failures. This post also discusses the rich set Azure services that Microsoft customers and organizations can use to protect personal data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations for various parts of the world.
September 5, 2017Sep 5, 201709/5/17In this post, Premier Developer consultant Lizet Pena De Sola explains Role Based Access Control in ASP.NET MVC.
Role Based Access Control in MVC is pretty straight forward. There is also a way to do claims access control,
August 16, 2017Aug 16, 201708/16/17This post on authentication and authorization is from Premier Developer consultant Marius Rochon.
Claims list included in the ClaimsPrincipal usually originate from the security token received by the application as part of user authentication (SAML,
May 30, 2017May 30, 201705/30/17This blog on securing your source code is from Premier Developer consultant Bill Reiss.
I saw a question recently about how to protect code in a Xamarin app package. I feel the first question is whether you need to,
Telemetry
January 23, 2019Jan 23, 201901/23/19Premier Developer Consultant Adel Ghabboun explorers how to setup alert notification email using Azure monitoring.
January 18, 2019Jan 18, 201901/18/19One feature was removed in Application Insights called Scheduled Analytics, and now it is replaced with Custom Log Search which allows us to create an Alerts based on data analytics queries.
October 10, 2018Oct 10, 201810/10/18 Both Flow and PowerApps are great tools that can be in the hands of business and power users to accelerate the building of automated workflows and business apps across on-premise and the cloud services. It’s easy to see how there could be many such Flows and Apps built, deployed and running within your tenant. It’s a best practice for the IT administrators to devise a monitoring strategy in place that could proactively keep a watch on these Flows, Apps and other related resources and alert and perform remediation actions as necessary.
Threading
February 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code,
Training
March 22, 2019Mar 22, 201903/22/19Anyone who has ever passed at least one of the Microsoft certification exams has a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) profile created with an ID (MCID) generated. This profile is now part of the Microsoft Learning platform that allows a person to track all activities related to certification accomplishments, both active and past.
February 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19As a Microsoft employee who works with customers and a cloud enthusiast, I see it essential to be knowledgeable of how the cloud can bring the best value to the developer. Because of this, I am taking the AZ 203 exam, which is titled “Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure”. This exam was in beta for some time and was recently released proper in January 2019. Developers used to the Microsoft certification world will see this exam as a replacement for 70-532, which is the older iteration of Azure technology geared for developers. Passing this exam will reward developers with the “Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate” certification. Going forward, most Microsoft certifications are moving to a job-role based (great take by Chris Pietschmann at Build Azure) approach, which in my opinion is a good move, as it allows folks to focus on passing exams that contain content that will directly be used on the job.
June 15, 2018Jun 15, 201806/15/18Are you interested in learning about DevOps and the newest advances in technology? Do you want to challenge your development perspectives and current practices? Read this post from Premier Developer Consultant Brian Blackman to find an upcoming conference for you and your team to attend.
March 21, 2018Mar 21, 201803/21/18Interested in upping your online presentation game? Looking for some tips to engage your audience on Skype calls? Read this post by Premier Developer Consultant Daisy Chaussee to learn how.
Today’s modern, virtual world relies on the ability to deliver content remotely.
July 14, 2017Jul 14, 201707/14/17This post is provided by Senior ADM, Jason Giordano, who spotlights our DebugDiag workshop available to Premier Support customers.
If you have ever engaged Microsoft to assist with an application hang or crash,
Uncategorized
April 4, 2019Apr 4, 201904/4/19This article is written to show you how to run Windows on a Mac that doesn’t have enough local storage by working around issue using an external USB drive and Windows To Go product to create image.
March 13, 2019Mar 13, 201903/13/19Diversity Driven Development (DDD) is concept that I’ve envisioned for some time. DDD can enable you, your team and/or your organization to build software and services that provide solution beyond just the current customer demographic.
March 8, 2019Mar 8, 201903/8/19Laurie Atkinson, Senior Consultant explains how to use the microsoft-adal-angular6 wrapper library to authenticate with Azure Active Directory in your Angular 6+ apps.
March 5, 2019Mar 5, 201903/5/19In this post, Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon show us how to obtain extra access tokens using OAuth2 Extension flow (on-behalf-of flow).
The following describes an approach for getting access tokens to more than one resource, without re-displaying the sign in dialog (using the V2 Azure AD endpoint).
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19In this follow up article, we will cover how it can help to deploy Container images stored into Azure Container Registry (ACR). We will also cover the kubectl explain integration which is helpful to understand the structure of YAML files used to describe Kubernetes API objects.
January 28, 2019Jan 28, 201901/28/19Microsoft Teams presents a lot of opportunities for developers and development teams, from helping to improve Team collaboration and agility to providing a platform for deploying great functionality for users.
August 13, 2018Aug 13, 201808/13/18I was only using Social Media as a place to hang out, relax, and kill time with friends. Then I had an epiphany. I could use social media for personal development, to enrich and advance my career.
August 9, 2018Aug 9, 201808/9/18GFlags (or the Global Flags Editor) enables and disables advanced debugging and troubleshooting features in Windows. You may be familiar with Gflags if you have had to isolate heap corruption issues or spent time developing Windows drivers. It’s also pretty handy to block the start of an application through debugging if it won’t respond any other way.
July 30, 2018Jul 30, 201807/30/18Why should you sign your code binaries and documents? Read this post to learn why, as Premier Developer Lizet Pena De Sola explains reasons and best practices.
UX
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19This example illustrates why building a better UI and caring about how your end users is so valuable. Not only can it improve their experience, but it can also save your business time and money.
April 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19One thing that I’ve heard more than a few times while working in UX is that you can’t put a price on look and feel. Personally, I want to clear the air right now and say you absolutely can. It’s not hard, but it does require narrowing your focus to a particular workflow.
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19When I first joined the Premier team here at Microsoft, a lot of the work I initially did for our customers was just that – advisory front-end design work. After many discussions about how I can provide value to our customers, I started to realize that even though words likes User Experience and User Centered Design are starting to be thrown out more and more in development, very few people have a full grasp of what exactly User Experience is.
Visual Studio
January 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19My first experience matched many of experiences I remember mentioned in the books I read. At first, paired programming was extremely intimidating. I had to pair with an extremely seasoned developer thinking that I was about to be proved that I was not as smart as I thought I was – see Imposter Syndrome. Well, I learned many lessons from this developer by pairing with him. And in the end the developer learned quite a bit from me.
October 2, 2018Oct 2, 201810/2/18It's all about the people. The resistance to change is human nature. Leaders and team members alike. Assessing the team is simple. If they can demonstrate an openness to changing how they do things you are on track. If team conversations consist of why things must continue to be done the way they are being done success will be a challenge. But leadership is the real key. Effective change is a collaborative process and management's primary team facing role is keeping the team within the agreed upon boundaries. But of equal importance is securing and managing executive sponsorship. The team is pushing hard against their own instincts for the betterment of the organization. The organization must support them and insulate them from organizational winds that look to disrupt their efforts.
May 23, 2018May 23, 201805/23/18In this post, App Dev Manager Ed Tovsen spotlight the features and benefits of Code Maps in Visual Studio.
Systems architects have long used modeling to design the structure, behavior, and interaction of systems within an organization.
April 26, 2018Apr 26, 201804/26/18ASP Core uses the convenient Provider Pattern to load configuration key/value pairs from various sources and expose those to you as a single Configuration object. This allows you to grab a configuration key like ConnectionString with one line of code regardless of where it was sourced from. However, the configuration API is not available by default in .NET Core Console applications.
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18In the second part of her SonarQube series, Premier Developer Consultant Sana Noorani builds on top of SonarQube technology and explains how SonarLint can be added in Visual Studio to track real time code quality.
What is SonarLint?
March 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard discusses how to set up Visual Studio 2017 to run JavaScript-based unit tests.
This week, I demonstrated to a client how they could write unit tests in JavaScript to test their JavaScript code by leveraging Karma,
March 25, 2018Mar 25, 201803/25/18In this post, Application Development Manager, Vijetha Marinagammanavar, demonstrates how to get started with Azure App Services.
To get started with Azure development we need to have Visual Studio 2013 or later, Azure SDK, and an active Azure subscription.
January 23, 2018Jan 23, 201801/23/18In this post, App Dev Manager Daniel Setlock reflects on the trust of open source software using the Food Truck Paradigm.
Introduction
It is somewhat shocking that in 2017 I still receive questions about how open source software,
November 13, 2017Nov 13, 201711/13/17This post from Premier Developer consultant Crystal Tenn walks you through customizing Visual Studio to work better for you and your organization.
I like tools that make my development faster and more organized. The small amount of time it takes to invest in installing and learning these tools pays off in the long run!
October 19, 2017Oct 19, 201710/19/17This post on using Visual Studio to develop Angular applications comes to us from Premier Developer consultant Wael Kdouh.
I engage with a lot of our customers that work on Angular applications and I frequently get asked the following question: Should we use Visual Studio 2017 or VS Code for our next application?
Web
March 13, 2019Mar 13, 201903/13/19Diversity Driven Development (DDD) is concept that I’ve envisioned for some time. DDD can enable you, your team and/or your organization to build software and services that provide solution beyond just the current customer demographic.
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Keith Beller walks use through Blazor, a new experimental framework for WebAssembly.
What is Blazor?
After 22 years of dominance as “the” native language for client-side browser interaction, JavaScript is facing new competition from other popular languages such as C/C++,
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19Enterprise organizations today have numerous simple CRUD based applications that call for modernization without necessarily needing to re-architect the legacy apps. If you have an existing .NET app that could use CI/CD but not necessarily any immediate rearchitecting efforts, this blog is for you.
February 26, 2019Feb 26, 201902/26/19When running IIS in a Windows Container, you configure it using PowerShell commands in your Dockerfile. While determining the correct PowerShell commands is not a difficult process it is inconvenient to verify the settings using the command line only. Sometimes, you just need a UI to quickly view and manage your IIS configuration.
February 20, 2019Feb 20, 201902/20/19I work with a lot of enterprise customers that have sizable portfolios of Intranet web sites using Web Forms and Windows Integrated Authentication that they would like to move to Azure PaaS; however, we’ve found that a lot of documentation on these topics doesn’t extend back to Web Forms and instead targets .NET Core and MVC.
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19App Dev Manager Vijetha Marinagammanavar provides a walk-through of setting up IIS on a Windows Virtual machine hosted in Azure.
January 14, 2019Jan 14, 201901/14/19There are a few key scenarios that you will want to consider as you plan your migration strategy. Unless you have unlimited time, resources and money, it is likely that you will have to consider implementing one or more of the following options…
December 27, 2018Dec 27, 201812/27/18Build a Boot web project, create a Dockerfile, build a Docker image, then run it in Docker.
December 20, 2018Dec 20, 201812/20/18Until recently Angular supported SwPush class which allowed PWA capable applications to subscribe and listen to push notifications from the Service Worker. Here is an example where I am subscribing to clicking on the notification card which will redirect the user to my blog. Also notice that you also have access to the action that triggered the click. So you can wire your code to react differently to different actions.
December 7, 2018Dec 7, 201812/7/18I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.
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