AWS Re:Invent 2017 – what’s out so far

30th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

What a week it’s been for AWS customers. Just in the last 5 days we already seen a huge number of product releases including:
AWS Sumerian: With Sumerian, you can construct an interactive 3D scene without any programming experience, test it in the browser, and publish it as a website that is immediately available to users. Product details can be found https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/announcing-amazon-sumerian-preview/
Amazon MQ:Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “AWS Re:Invent 2017 – what’s out so far”

Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI

30th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

In the last couple of weeks I’ve posted about visualizing relationships of data from Microsoft Identity Manager using Power BI. Earlier this week I posted about building a Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manger to integrate with xMatters.
In this post I combine data from the last two in order to allow us to visualise the geographic office locations for an organisation and then summary data about it (how many employees are located there, and what departments).… [Keep reading] “Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI”

Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

If you’re a technical consultant working with cloud services like Office 365 or Azure on behalf of various clients, you have to deal with many different logins and passwords for the same URLs. This is painful, as your default browser instance doesn’t handle multiple accounts and you generally have to resort to InPrivate (IE) or Incognito (Chrome) modes which mean a lot of copying and pasting of usernames and passwords to do your job. If this is how you operate today: stop.… [Keep reading] “Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants”

Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

PhonePeople

How did you know about this blog post?

It’s likely that you were notified by your smartphone or device, the notification itself as a part of trundle that you’re figuratively swiping left in-between email reminders about upcoming events and direct messages from your favourite social media. Or you were trawling your usual network feeds for updates to catch your attention.
Now if you were to time the window in which you check your smart device again for notifications, new messages or general updates, I’d bet that this window would be within a minute or just outside of it, and would require no prompting whatsoever… much like, say, breathing?… [Keep reading] “Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?”

Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago one of my customers had a requirement to provision and manage identities into xMatters. The xMatters API Documentation looked straight-forward and I figured it would be pretty quick to knock up an PowerShell Management Agent.
The identification of users (People) in xMatters was indeed pretty quick. I was quickly able to enumerate all users (that had initially been seeded independent of FIM/MIM) and join them to corresponding users in the MetaVerse.… [Keep reading] “Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters”

HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Game programming is an entirely different paradigm for an enterprise application developer in terms of the tools, processes and patterns used. But like any other development engagement, to kick start the development phase and to reduces the learning curve, it is always helpful to have a set of pre-baked tools handy. In the world of HoloLens application development, Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit is your best companion.
The Mixed Reality Toolkit is an open source project driven by Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit”

HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

Moving an Office 365 domain to a new tenant

26th of November, 2017 / / 4 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
There are times when companies acquire other companies to increase their portfolio. When this happens, the acquired company’s IT infrastructure normally gets merged with the parent company. The opposite of this situation is also true. There are also times when a company sells off one of its acquired companies or divisions. In this scenario, the company that is being sold off must have all its IT infrastructure separated from the parent company.… [Keep reading] “Moving an Office 365 domain to a new tenant”

VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 2: How?

26th of November, 2017 / / 13 Comments

In the last post, I described why you might want to define your build definition as a YAML file using the new YAML Build Definitions feature in VSTS. In this post, we will walk through an example of a simple VSTS YAML build definition for a .NET Core application.

Application Setup

Our example application will be a blank ASP.NET Core web application with a unit test project. I created these using Visual Studio for Mac’s ASP.NET… [Keep reading] “VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 2: How?”